A NEW COSMOLOGY

door to the donkey den

 

Today's movie was made from the Graham Greene novel, Our Man In Havana. Alec Guiness, Burl Ives, Ralph Richardson, Noel Coward, Maureen O'Hara and Ernie Kovacs. 1959. Graham Greene novels tend to make good films. According to my own taste, I find film screenplays made from novels have quite a lot more interesting stories than films made from screenplay as original source. Graham Greene stories make films that have surprise twists and turns, actually written for a very different audience than a straight screenplay. Greene wrote for readers. An original screenplay is for movie goers. This film was made in the time stage actors were making movies like multi-scene plays. I felt like I was watching an acting feast with these London stage actors who were the top dogs of their day. The film was new when I was in high school. It is not something I would have seen. It would have been way over my teenage head. If I did see it when it was new, I probably sat through it thinking: When is something going to happen? I don't believe I could have followed it. I can't even fathom how ignorant I was in the eleventh grade. I'm not exaggerating. I was so ignorant, even I knew it. Asked why I went to college, it wasn't for an office job, but I was so ignorant I needed education. Didn't matter if it was a small southern college instead of Chapel Hill or Athens, Georgia. I needed to learn basics. Grew up in a house where television presided, Kansas fundamentalist church, and public school with no motivation from home other than threats. I had to get away from the mind that led to nowhere, circling in blame and self-pity.

 

ice in a square bucket

 

 

At the bottom of my own pit, the US Navy abducted me for two year active duty, which I hated at the time for taking me out of my life. Those years were spent reading in every spare moment. I had wanted to take Senior English in high school, the most interesting teacher in the school, but it required so much reading, my absence of self-esteem told me I couldn't keep up. And I probably couldn't have. Home amounted to a hornets nest of rage in my head. I kept on that track after I left and found my first apartment. Navy snatched me out of my life and gave me two years to look it over, where I came from and where I'm going. Where I'm going started with education. The very first thing I needed to reenter the world was education. The church had filled my head with such nonsense it took fifteen years to wipe it all away. I had to throw the baby out with the bathwater, unable to separate them. They'd become the same. I came to see religion as another power of the few over the many. I couldn't see beyond the fraudulence of religion. Then, by what was perceived from my side as chance, I came in spirit face to face with Meher Baba. In three days I committed. I came to see God Is. There was no way I could go on living as if God were not. Religion has little to do with God. It is the power of the few over the many. Every religion has become decadent with time, why God returns over and over, as Zoroaster, Rama, Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, and if you'll allow me my own point of view, Meher Baba. His role as a God-man was not to start a new religion, but to reform all the religions until they're like beads on a string. He called himself the Awakener, "I came not to teach, but to awaken." He woke me up out of a torpor I had fallen into without regard for the spirit of life.

 

ice circle

 

 

I needed to get out of the city where my habit patterns were created. I wanted to live rurally and work manually. I wanted to live alone at the edge of the world as a monk in a monastery of one, follow my own light, study this new zone I'd entered where God is love, not anything else. All that goes with love, like compassion, altruism, justice, God Is. If God is the ocean of love and we are drops of the ocean flying through the air, the drops are still the ocean. I visualize the time in the body like seeing the breakers at the beach, white waves splashing drops of water through the air ahead of them and they fall back into one with the ocean. The flight through the air was illusion of separation while the drop continued to be ocean itself having an experience air surfing. In our flight through the air in the form of a drop, we say, I am I, and then return to I Am. This is as brief as I can make the period of adjustment to a new cosmology: God is love, nothing short of unconditional love. No exceptions. I came to the mountains with this my mental playing field to find my own way to live in this world knowing what I know. I needed to be off to myself to digest it. For about the first twenty years, nobody much knew I was here but the people I knew to work with, neighbors and an old-time religion Regular Baptist church I went to for fourteen years. The preacher of the church, Laurel Glenn, was Millard Pruitt. In the pulpit his only subject was love. Outside the pulpit, love was a four-letter word.

 

composition in rock and wood

 

 

My church now is everyday life and has been for several years. I like to go to a Primitive Baptist meeting from time to time to hear the singing and participate in it, and to hear a Bible scholar's take on the scriptures. There always comes a time I'm expected to be there more often, and then I never go again. I'm not going to join, so I stay away. I can hear the Primitive Baptist hymns on cd at home. I can hear Tibetan hymns on cd at home too. I can hear Islamic sitar music from India on cd at home. First time I heard that old style mountain singing from inside a church where it was going on blew my mind to smithereens and made the tears flow. Two old boys sang a song, Elder Millard Pruitt and Ray Caudill. I don't remember what it was, but an educated guess would make it My Home In Heaven, one they sang with such soul as Ralph Stanley sings Gloryland. They sounded ancient. It was old men singing a hymn they have sung all their lives and knew how to sing like Tommy Jarrell knew how to play Sally Ann on his fiddle. It was ancient like all the way within to tribal times when praises to God were sung by old men around drums, It was primal. It even had an ancient temple feel about it. It was antiquity in its last gasp before fading out. The spirit just faded from the place after Elder Pruitt was unable to preach anymore from the feebleness of old age. Donald Duck cartoons would have been better than his replacement. There came a day I could not push the screen door open to leave the house to go listen to nothing. I realized then, my time there was over.

 

three rocks

 

 

I've stayed away from religion ever since. I call my path my pilgrim way. I don't mean pilgrim like Cotton Mather and burning psychic women to death. I mean it entirely differently. I mean it one soul in one body walking my own path by Divine guidance keeping me from falling into wells looking at my own reflection. It's kind of like God says, "If that's what you gotta do, its what you gotta do. I'll hold onto your belt so you don't fall in." I tend not to read spiritual sorts of books anymore, and I don't think about God a whole lot as something "out there." I'm finding God in the flow of everyday life, in the people around me, everywhere, the birds, the four-leggeds, all of us animated by love. The butterflies, the toads, the chickens, cats, dogs, donkeys, all animated by love. In this time of the life I'm living by letting go, acting out Don't Worry ~ Be Happy in everyday life. I'm more social in this time than I've ever been. I see more and more that the spirit of God is in other people. I seem to have reached a place where I enjoy just about any sort of person I meet along the way. I feel like I have come to a place where I see the light of life in every living thing, and that light of life is God. It's not like woo-woo, but like everyday life with all the emotions and hormones and defenses that go with it. We're every one of us God in a body having a hard time trying to figure out how to live with it. Of course, God understands; God experiences through our bodies, our senses. God is our consciousness, the self that sees our dreams, sees through our eyes, thinks with our minds, experiences through our senses. This is where I connect with my four-legged friends and everyone I know, the Hindu greeting, Namaste, the God in me greets the God in you. Lord have mercy, who called me to preach?

 

donkey jen

 

 

*

 

 

 

LANCE ARMSTRONG AND A COUNTRY PREACHER

     robert mangold


Continuing absurdity in the news is the beating Lance Armstrong into the ground with "allegations" about "doping," by somebody who has a passion to strip Armstrong of his medals and everything. It's obviously a hate vendetta, but it's not PC to say that. They're saying because Armstrong is done with being hounded and tested and tested to the point he doesn't care any more, he's guilty. Let them have it all. They want his trophies and winnings so bad, he really doesn't have a choice. Now they're claiming he's admitting guilt by throwing up his hands and saying take it all. He's been tested every race, extensively tested and extensively tested on top of that. Like he, himself, said in his own words, "They have no physical evidence." The entire log of evidence against Armstrong is all hearsay, totally hearsay. Somebody said, I seen him do it. Then it's, OMG Somebody seen him do it! Next they have the guy they put out for doping accusing Armstrong, he too seen him do it. Now they have a line of people that seen him do it, but he has been tested every day along the way and there's no evidence at all.


These allegations badgering Lance Armstrong are something like small town gossip or faculty lounge gossip. He said that she said that he had halitosis. I knew an old-time Regular Baptist preacher, Millard Pruitt, in my first 15 years in the mountains. He was a man of honor. I knew him fairly well, knew some of his brothers and sisters, his wife and daughter, the people of his world, his entire family. I knew him to be a man of integrity. His integrity was between him and God, a direct line. It's true he had a weakness for pretty young girls, appreciated them for their feminine beauty. To say he was flirtatious would have been like saying he was a child molester because he liked little kids and the kids liked him. If there was any man I'd ever known who would not get himself a little something on the side from a girl in his church who was getting a divorce, it was him. No way. I knew the woman too. But the stories that went around the county about him stuck like glue, as those stories do. One absurd woman I knew told me about it to be certain I understood that preacher wasn't what he appeared to be. "I seen em do it!" I didn't allow myself to laugh out loud. I was thinking of dogs in the grocery store parking lot. Just telling me she was there to witness the penetration told me it was a lie.


All the time I knew Millard Pruitt, I knew a man who was incapable, even at the age of 30, to have a one-time liaison in public with a young woman in his church he'd known since she was a child, in the time that she was involved in a traumatic divorce. Not even in private. He was incapable. I knew his brothers and sisters. No matter what kind of sexual typhoon took hold of his crotch, his integrity as a man of honor, leaving the called-to-preach part aside, would not allow him to even entertain the thought if it came to mind, and I'd project that it never did come to mind. I knew he bore no guilt about it before God or his wife or the woman involved with him in the story. I knew him to be the same as a monk in his relationship with his Lord. He was from his beginning. Millard Pruitt lived in the world and was not of it. When he was being called to preach, he resisted the call for a couple years, didn't want to go there. He wanted to play fiddle at dances on weekends and work like a man all week. Called to preach, he had to give up playing fiddle at dances or playing the fiddle at all in public. It had the name the Devil's instrument. He didn't believe that, but that didn't stop everybody else from believing it. The spirit of the Lord won the struggle and Millard never looked back.


Along the way several people have said to me, "You know, Millard has a woman story 'gin him." Then we share our hypotheses on the matter. Some could not see even a remote possibility, and some could make a convincing case. I tended to prefer the individuals who saw Millard as I saw him, a man of such integrity of the spirit he's not going to have a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am moment with a young woman in his church involved in a traumatic divorce she's seeking spiritual advice over. He wasn't one to take advantage of anybody for any reason, certainly not a woman in her situation. Millard was such a personality that some people loved and some people hated. It was no in-between with Millard. The people that loved Millard paid the story no mind, while the people that hated him embraced the story and kept it going.


Millard's integrity was not self-repression. His integrity was drawn by his love for God. His integrity was open to the spirit. He lived his life in God's light. He valued that light. It was the light of day for him. By light I think I mean along the same line as what I mean when I feel reluctance to do or entertain anything that might knock me off my track, or out of my flow. When I'm in my flow I don't want interruption. My flow includes my everyday life, people I see, all that. It doesn't mean the phone ringing sets me into a state of alarm. And it doesn't mean shutting out the unexpected. I like the unexpected. Not always at the time. An interruption to my flow would be going away for a weekend, leaving Caterpillar. I can't go anyplace anymore, because I want to sleep in my own bed every night. I don't like to cross the county line anymore unless I'll be back by bedtime. When I'm in my flow, I feel like I'm in the light of God. It's best characterized visually by seeing a leaf float down a mountain stream, riding the flow around and over rocks, rollin' down the river. Slowness is the key to happiness. Sometimes I feel like I have slowed down now to a zone where I feel like I can now go slowly through the day and at the same time get a lot done. I feel like I'm sniffing the crack under the door to happiness.


In this time of the life I am able to do what I want to do. It happened by letting go of everything after a life that required me to be someplace else every day. I sat around and watched movies, read, visited friends, slept late, stayed up late, whatever. Passed the days as I felt like it. I foresaw a lengthy transition from being told what to do all the time to being allowed to do whatever I feel like doing. It feels like I'm more productive than ever, simply as a human being. Possibly more accessible in spirit. Maybe? Maybe so. I enjoy the people around me more than ever. In a big way I feel buoyed by the people around me, the people of my world. They are the cast in the play I have a role in too. I really have never cared whether Millard's "woman story" had any validity. If I believed he did, I'd have thought nothing of it. I understand matters of the groin somewhat. Enough to allow a man a lapse in a lifetime. Millard didn't have lapses. His faith didn't have lapses. Millard Pruitt was as much a monk as my monk friend Swami Yogeshananda living in a Hindu monastery in California. Millard Pruitt was a monk in the Regular Baptist branch of Christendom. I respected him as such in the time I knew him because I saw it in him. Millard was an honorable man. I believe Lance Armstrong is an honorable man too. I feel like he's all the more honorable for being able to tell them to shove it.


*  

GRUMBLINGS IN THE EARTH

        kurt schwitters, 3

In all my time in the mountains, I have had the same bed, a wooden frame with a 3/4 inch plywood surface and an old, like something Social Services would arrest me for sleeping on, cotton mattress, all fluffed up after a day in the sun, it's about 4 inches thick. After being slept on every night and countless days it's about an inch thick, if that, where the imprint of my mortal frame has custom-fitted it for me, personally. Like the way a shoe feels better the longer it's worn. That imprint is my hammock and with the blanket makes my cocoon from which I rise refreshed and ready to face whatever is next. I don't have wings, but my spirit has me upright, the spirit being what the wings symbolize, unless angels really do look like white doves flying.


I knew an old Regular Baptist elder who died of old age 20 years ago; he told me of a time an angel came to him in the living room and he recognized it for a winged angel. Another man told me of a time an angel came to him. These were old mountain people, the origin of American pragmatism. You're not going to fool one of them with an hallucination or a dream. Maybe you could fool one, but it wouldn't be Millard Pruitt getting fooled. Millard's credibility was a hundred percent with me when he told me he saw an angel. Accuse him of lying about it and he'd be up out of his chair before you could say scat. Though that wasn't the reason I believed him. I believed him because I knew him.


Back to the wooden bed. It has no springs, no cushioning. I prefer to sleep on the board itself, which I have done, but the mattress is the same thing as on the board, having no cushion value. The mattress is a mold for my frame that holds me in place comfortably like an old shoe. Some years ago reading a book about Shirdi Sai Baba, I saw that he slept on a plank of wood. It took years, a lot of years before I felt I was ready. From that moment on, it subconsciously became my goal to be able to sleep on a board. Chiropractors recommend a hard bed. I found I like it even better than on a mattress. My mortal frame feels best when I sleep on my bed that is the same as a board, as the mattress I lie on is about as thick as a thin blanket. I like it. It is the only bed I can be comfortable in. I've never liked a big mattress bed. They're more like wrestling rings without ropes than a place for repose. All the sheets and fitted sheets, box springs and all that goes with it, I'd rather use an open sleeping bag for a blanket. Wear bed clothes and it doesn't get dirty so fast. I'm not looking for a spread in Southern Living. The only way SL would look at my home would be an example of a Feng Shui disaster.


This is taking the long way around of getting to being able to feel grindings of tectonic plates way down deep. Most often, and consistently until the last few years, I felt the same kind of grindings. It was so subtle vibrating I'd question if the vibrating might be coming from inside me. I wondered what it was for a very long time, until I felt a fairly strong vibration, by comparison, from an earthquake maybe 300 miles away. Of course, I thought, a shock wave travels through rock way down deep underground perhaps at least as fast as sound travels through air. Maybe it's simultaneous. That one was notably a hair stronger than was the norm. Enough to make me notice it. It's amusing to be lying in bed and suddenly it feels like the Fifties motel room bed that vibrated a few minutes for a quarter, long enough to make you wish it would stop long before it does. It's like when the tree frogs are trilling and I can't tell if it's in my head or outside. That's the feeling. Am I trembling or is it the ground? By now I'm used to it. It was never enough to wake me, only felt it while awake.


Over the last year I've felt odd scrapings like I'd never felt before. They started getting my attention again after noticing the grumblings were becoming unsubtle enough to wake me from a light sleep. Then one came in rapid succession, like a slow Uzi, but more like slamming a fist from one hand into the heel of the hand of the other at a fairly rapid pace, though not all out rapid. It woke me and did that quck-punch grinding long enough that I grew tired of focusing on it and went back to sleep. Another time was a long, powerful grinding that felt so unnatural it flashed: fracking. Oh no. Halliburton, naturally. Dick Cheney, naturally. Enemies of the American people. It is seriously poisoning the water all over the country, doing it fast and doing it bad. By bad, I don't even mean where ethics is concerned, only the nature of their product: seriously poison water on a very large scale, like all the underground water, the source of our water. Soon we'll be like Bermuda, an island without fresh water. They keep the roofs painted white with lime and catch the water in barrels when it rains. If fracking goes on much further, at all further, our nation will be devoid of the next resource to go to war over, water. All the more reason for perpetual war for perpetual peace.


Allowing Halliburton and the others the right to destroy our ground water all over the country is beyond absurd. Yet, the gas corporation lobby insures full scholarships to the right schools for Congressional kids, the privilege of membership in the right country clubs, a nice car with a driver, expensive lunches and dinners for free, for corruption, for rising in society, for being sucked up to as a big dog. I look at the kinds of people who become politicians and they make phys ed majors look brilliant. We trust our very existence to them. How ignorant is that? They call the Indians that lived on the continent savages. They at least honored wisdom and after how many thousand years left the continent as pristine as before the first human set foot on it. They flowed with Grandmother Earth. In canoes they could see the bottom of the river and the fish, which were plentiful all those millenia of ignernt spear chuckers running about half naked and beating on a hollow log with sticks.


Don't laugh yet. We got nothing on them. I repeat. We got nothing on them. You and I are not the ones destroying our planet. We get the blame. We are doing our part for the destruction by allowing the corporate world to have its way. Now is too late to take control away from them, even if we made a commendable effort. But what can we do? The system does not include us. United States of America is out of business when the government does not protect the American people from predatory corporate targeting. Why would it? Our government has been usurped in the Shakespearean way, democracy outlawed while We the People watched it happen on tv every evening and never noticed. One thing we do know. The oil corporations are going to do what they want to do and we're not even the bother of a swarm of gnats to them. Not even the bother of a cell phone dead zone.

*  

LEARNING THE OLD TIME WAYS

     hanging on

In the last weeks I've been reviewing why I left the city and came to the country with no money, no knowledge of where I was except Blue Ridge Mountains. Hillbillies, moonshine, shotguns and poverty was all I thought I knew. I wanted to work. In the city, after college graduation, there was nothing I wanted to do in the work world but work in a bookstore and bookstores were over. I wanted to go to the tech college and take a carpentry course and work outdoors. I wanted labor and solitude. In the time of wondering how I could do that and work too, I was lured consciously by God to a place and time where I came to understand that God indeed is. There's no going back on that. Reading various scriptures I came to see that I had undone from my mind and belief system the externals of religion, but had not, as I thought I had, abandoned the core teachings, the red letter passages, what I learned later was the Jefferson Bible. He trimmed it down to the words of the Master only. That was when I saw I really did believe, had myself fooled, really had myself fooled.



My inner world took a 180 degree turn. What was ahead before, became behind, and vice versa. The path I was taking before came to nothing. I wanted to rethink everything. I needed to get away from my habits, make a fresh start at the bottom. I found an opportunity to work the summer farm of people I knew in Charleston. It had 250 acres and 23 head of cattle. A Christmas tree patch too. I was to work with an old farmer, Tom Pruitt, who was 72. He took care of the farm and asked them to get somebody to live here and work the farm year round. I jumped in. The house I'd be living in took me back in deja vu to a moment l3-14 years before, itself a deja vu that I learned maybe five years ago was the house my greatgrandmother lived in when I was a little child. The house had a golden glow about it the first time I saw it. The glow said this is your home. A handful of months later I was moving into the old Air Bellows schoolhouse between Christmas and New Years. No kitchen. No bathroom. No running water. An outhouse. A creek. 5 rooms. What a winter it was.



That's what I left the city for. But why did I feel I needed to leave the city? I felt like everything around me was false, all of it a whirlwind around nothing. Money and position never attracted me. My head was swimming from a world of things I didn't want to do. I saw it that we're the workers in a Death Star; everything that pays well is associated with supporting the Death Star. I couldn't participate in that system. I didn't like supporting napalm from the sky on primitive villages with grass huts, farming people, their kids, their lives, their homes, their prayers, their ancestors. Upon completion of 2 years active duty in the Navy, involuntary servitude in the time of the draft, I was done with the Death Star. I wanted to do work that would contribute to the well being of humanity, not to killing Asian children without reason that had anything to do with them. Working on the farm I'd contribute by providing food, albeit fast food burgers. I called the bull Big Mac.  I felt this was good work for the conscience. I couldn't see any direct way that I was adding my services, my power to the Death Star working on the farm, putting up hay for the cattle, feeding it to them in the winter, keeping them healthy for the big M.



I wanted to learn farming the old time way from old man Tom Pruitt. I learned by working with him, giving him a hand, watching him, the old time way. Automatically, I'd expected him to teach me by telling me how to do this and that, give me instruction. It was all experience for Tom. You learn by doing. He taught me how to put a fence post in the ground so it will never wiggle. He taught me how to stretch barbed wire so it will be tight for years to come. He taught me about clearing brush and burning brush piles. I listened closely to everything he said. I was in graduate school learning how to use post hole diggers, a chainsaw, a sledgehammer, an axe, a bushaxe, a shovel, hammer, a scythe. Tom taught me how to drop a tree exactly where I want it, whichever way it was leaning, without using a rope. Tom was good at cutting down and cutting up a tree. He'd cut firewood every year all his life. In the early years it was a long saw blade with a handle at each end for two men to work the rhythm together like making music. Then the chainsaw where a man put the tree down by himself. Tom was an expert with an axe. He could lay it down on a pencil line every time. His accuracy with an axe was known all over Whitehead.



Tom would sit in his wooden rocking chair that didn't rock in front of his wood stove. The pipe from the stove went up the chimney shaft, the stove standing out in front of the fireplace that hadn't been used in a very long time. He spit into the open fireplace, the wall inside covered in dried brown snuff, a terra cotta color. He also spit onto the door of the woodstove. Mostly he spit into a Maxwell House instant coffee jar that stood beside his chair. He'd lean over the chair arm and let a brown string fall right down the center of the 3 inch opening, every time. Three calendars on the walls, all on different months and years, none current. In the winter, he sat by the stove, faced the wall like a monk for months, his style of hibernation. It was his meditation time. He thought about the gospel, the teachings, interpreting the teachings, remembering the good preaching, remembering the time and the place at Landmark (then) Regular Baptist Church in Whitehead. Tom was tapped into the spirit as well as anyone I've known. Tom lived literally in the presence of the Lord. He was honestly a righteous man. I've seen him glow talking about his Lord. And he didn't go to church, hadn't for a number of years.



Tom put me in touch with his brother Millard's Regular Baptist Church after I'd been here a year. He took me one Saturday night when a West Virginia coal miner preacher was to be preaching, Walter Green, a preacher with as solid a reputation as there was when it came to preaching in the spirit. He wanted to offer me the experience of what old-time preaching was like. The preacher didn't show up, but Tom's brother Millard, standing to dismiss everyone after 4 preachers had run their mouths but none in the spirit, the spirit hit Millard and he took off. The charge went up my spine like Tom had told me it would. Again like he told me, I looked around and everybody was feeling it. Everything Tom had told me about it was there, how I felt, everything. Until I experienced it, what he said had little more meaning for me than a definition of a word I'd never heard of. The experience brought it to life. That was my first peep into the soul of these mountains. These were people who lived the first 40 or so years of their lives without electricity in the way of life that had always been without it. Electricity changed everything. Both Tom and Millard told me hours and hours of memories of the old ways in the time they looked back to as the golden age when people thought something of one another.

* 

THE BLUE RIDGE IN MY HEART

spring lizard creek



For several days my mind has been dwelling on my love for the South. It's hard to define the South in an all-inclusive way, because cultures in the South vary as much as accents. Same language, same bigger culture, but subtle differences from one section of a state to another. Subtle differences, but differences the older people who knew the various accents, where they came from, named where the speaker was from. Now, however, accents in the South are homogenizing with the rest of the country through television and radio, pop music. It's the nature of the change we're going through together as a nation. Southern accents are not nearly as unique as they used to be. A man I know from over around Ararat, Virginia, across the state line from Mount Airy, my age, and he still has a strong accent from that region of Virginia. It's a beautiful accent, like the accent around Lynchburg. Hoose for house.



In my early years in the mountains I listened to the old people talk and it was music. It's still music in my ears, but the people with the old accents are all gone. The older people now have less of an accent. I arrived here in 1976, my neighbor, Tom Pruitt was 72, born 1904. Electricity came through here in the mid 40s, so that put him over 40 when he started using electricity. Knowing Tom, it was for no more than a few lightbulbs, if any. He built bathroom on the side of the house and 16 years later connected it to water. He never put up a shower curtain. Kept a mop outside the shower stall, and when he finished a shower, he mopped the floor. He never once drove a tractor. He was afraid of them, knew of too many men killed by them. Tom paid attention. When every year somebody you know gets killed on a tractor, it tells you something if you pay attention.



Tom's accent was thick. From the first time I talked with him, I understood him clearly. It may have been that I was so enchanted by talking with a Blue Ridge Mountain hillbilly, the real deal, hillbilly itself. I couldn't get enough of listening to him. He had opinions that were a bit antique. Like, "Why do they want to put a bomb on the moon? Th'aint nothin up there. The Bible says the moon is just a light. You can't drop a bomb on a light." I sometimes regret that I never wrote down the things Tom said, his stories he told me over 14 years. It didn't feel right at the time. Our conversation was man to man, what he said was meant for me. I thought about recording him talk many times, but it would make it artificial. It's like an observer changes outcomes. I felt like the spirit of our conversation would be less authentic recorded. I felt like making notes toward telling his story would be using him to my own gain, which I have always been unable to do.



It was the same with his brother, Millard, the Regular Baptist preacher. His language so beautiful to my ears. Hearing him preach in the old-time mountain way in-the-spirit was as good as music. He was a good singer too. He had the kind of singing voice that if he hadn't been called to preach, he'd have been a fiddler, banjo picker and guitar picker who sang the old songs beautifully. Since he was called to preach, he sang the old hymns beautifully. He kept the fiddle, banjo and guitar at home. They had no place in the church house. He played the fiddle for me a few times and it was the old-old-time sawing, 2 strings at a time, the particular squawk that is the sound of these mountains, like the steel guitar is the sound of country music. It's a sound that is precious to the mountain ear, and totally inaccessible to an outsider. Unless it's an outsider like me who wanted to learn the mountain culture, at least well enough to get around in it. I don't dare ask for more than that. That's plenty. Mountain culture is something nobody from outside can entirely get. You have to be born here to understand it, then it's nothing to understand, because it's just life. As in the Tao, the only way to know it is not to know it.



The singing in Elder Millard Pruitt's church was to my ear what heaven must be. With high ceilings, lamps that hung down by chains from the ceiling, the acoustics in the place were perfect for singing. The sound in the place could not have been better. Millard leading the singing and Eura Lee Phipps repeating every phrase in her high hillbilly voice could bring me to tears just hearing it. At Tom's funeral, Harold Church, Tom's cousin and the undertaker, picked all the good old-time singers as they came in and put them in 3 rows in front of where I was sitting. Tom wanted 3 songs sung at his funeral, and when it came that time, the people in those rows stood and sang the songs, Eura Lee repeating the phrases. I'd bawled my eyes out for a half hour the day before, and went to the funeral assuming I'd got all that done. When those people started singing, I was so overwhelmed, it started all over again. I leaned forward and let the tears fall to the floor between my feet. Didn't think to bring a rag. The tears made a puddle.



It's the most beautiful church music I've heard. No instruments, no bang-bang piano chords, but slow, meditative singing, slow enough to pay attention to the words and think about their meaning. It's a cultural tendency for us to look at another time and think them backward because they might believe the earth is flat, that nobody ever went to the moon, that a man is the king of his castle, that old early American stuff, individualism that we think of as obsolete and over, like the Constitution after the Bush administration. Among the older people I knew who spent the first half of their lives in the old way, not one of them was ignorant in any way. I found them to be among the most intelligent people I've known, which includes several college grads and some with advanced degrees. When it comes to intelligence, some of the farmers had it in abundance. Still do. They may not know much about American poetry or Southern literature, but they can interpret the Bible in ways that you shudder from the crystal clarity of it, one can put up a wire fence without a bit of slack in the wires, which is no easy accomplishment, something you have to learn. They learned it when they were children. They know human character and behavior impressively well. I saw immediately there is no fooling any of these people in any way. I never set out to, and it's a good thing, because I'd have only failed.



* 

SILENCE AND NONSILENCE

tom van buren pruitt

Thinking lately about David Lynch's film, THE STRAIGHT STORY, the tale of a retired truck driver who had lost his driver's license due to drinking and driving. He hadn't seen his brother in 10 years---they'd fallen out drunk. Brother lived 2 states over. It's legal to drive a riding mower without a license, so he rigged a trailer to pull behind the mower that would carry his tent, sleeping bag and food. He set out on the highway staying close to the side of the road. In one town his machine gave out and a man at a hardware store gave him a new one. After quite a long ride, he arrives at brother's house, an old house in the country that hadn't been painted since it was new a long time ago. Brother was sitting on a chair or swing, Harry Dean Stanton, and the old boy with the mower sat in another chair on the porch. They sat in silence for a long time, end of movie.



In my first 14 years in the mountains, I knew brothers, Tom Pruitt, who lived up the road to the west a third of a mile, and Millard who lived in Glade Valley, about a 20 minute drive. Tom lived at the homeplace. Millard, an old-time religion preacher, lived close to his church, Laurel Glenn Regular Baptist. There came a time I thought I'd take Millard, who was a shut-in with heart issues, lived in a recliner, preferring it to a hospital bed, to see his brother Tom, my neighbor. I knew they hadn't seen each other in several years. We went in the house and they sat in silence for an hour. They just sat. It was like presence was good enough. A few years later I took Tom to visit Millard. Again, for an hour they sat in silence. I was fairly well aware of country ways then, but that one took me by surprise. When I saw Lynch's film, which was true to life all the way along, I remembered Tom and Millard without words. I respect it for something I didn't understand. They understood.



I'd come from the city where people talk to beat the band. Tom and Millard were of the country. When you think about it, farming was solitary work. Mama at the house with the garden, kids and cooking had as solitary a life as her husband out in the field working the horses, repairing the fences, all of it alone work except at harvest time and wood gathering time when neighbors worked together. No radio. Singing hymns while working. Even working with others, there wasn't much talking. The old-time mountain people were not talkers. They were workers. They didn't have the gift of gab. They committed thinking in abundance. They thought things through. Now, with everybody carrying a cell phone in a pocket, not very many people today think things through. Some do, of course, but it's not as common as it used to be. In this time we're in, we keep ourselves distracted by noise all through the day. Driving, we have radio and satellite radio. At home an infinity of distractions keeps our attention fractured at all times. People now interrupt two people talking like it's a duty. You see two people in conversation, you MUST, absolutely must, interrupt them. It is American as apple pie, baseball and sex-drugs-n-rocknroll. Interrupting so American it's patriotic.



This matter of silence tells a great deal about the differences between mountain country people and the city people taking up in the mountains. They all watch television. The older mountain people are not ones to talk. They've worked all their lives alone. Silence and solitude gives a man time to think about whatever he needs to think about. About all the mountain people I've known are comfortable with silence. That is changing, has already changed, as the younger mountain people are the same as city people, the same influences, the same access to pop whatever you want, the same dread of silence. Some weeks ago I heard a band with a city-minded woman playing the bass. She talked between songs like there wasn't enough time to get it all said. About 2/3 of the way through the show, an older woman, up in her70s, spoke up from the audience and said, "Did your mother ever tell you to shut up?" When I heard that, I thought, there it is. One values jabber and the other does not. Different generations, different ways of thinking, very different experience. She said it laughing, no intent to be insulting. Sometimes enough is enough.



When I was new to these mountains, working outdoors alone, alone at home. It took several winters before I learned how to get through winters. I took up drawing and painting to get through the winters. I came here for solitude and couldn't handle it. I jumped in the deep end too soon, maybe. It took awhile to prefer silence to noise distraction, radio in my case. By now I've learned it fairly well. I like to be alone. I like to be without radio on or any music. I like NPR radio and music too. Mostly I have silence in the house. Caterpillar prefers silence too. Out here in the mountain there are subtle sounds everywhere; woodpeckers, chickadees, towhees, crickets, tree frogs, katydids. Every season has its own sounds, the sounds of silence. In summer I like the door open and windows to let the sounds from outside come into the house.



*





TRUE HUMAN BEINGS

the barn



This small barn, top floor for keeping hay, bottom floor for keeping calves or a cow or two. It has a couple of feeding troughs. Tom Pruitt built the barn. He cut the wood, took it to John Richardson's sawmill at the foot of the hill in Whitehead and it was sawed there by Jr Maxwell, who was working the sawmill for Richardson at the time. My affection for the barn is in that it was built by two men who have told me the stories of their lives over a period of years. In telling me their lives they were also teaching me their culture. Tom's life was around farming and his Lord. I learned the history of Air Bellows from him, the stories of the lives of what he called "the old people," the people that were old and died when he was young, one and two generations before his. He could tell me back that far and no more. Jr too, could only tell his story involved in bluegrass banjo picking, bull-noser driving, sawmilling, tractor fixing, to a couple of generations back. The same with Tom's brother, Millard, whose life was involved in the Regular Baptist church among the preachers, farming, pipe factory, the Esso station in Sparta, carrying the mail.



These were the people who taught me the culture my parachute landed me in the midst of. When it comes to people I have known who lived their lives by the integrity of their own beliefs of what constitutes a life lived honestly in God's eye, these men are the ones. All three of them lived in God's sight, and all of them, I believe, were beloved in God's intimate care. Millard, the preacher, was the more pious of them, though not by a lot. Millard's piety was inside himself. He didn't act pious, though he was a man conscious of his thoughts, words and actions. Millard was a preacher I have no doubt was indeed "called" by God to preach in the Regular Baptist Church. I have seen the conviction of his belief so convincingly I believe it too. I've seen that Millard didn't settle for hocus-pocus. It had to be a great deal more convincing than something you're not quite sure if it came from God or from ego or imagination or from wanting it so much. He didn't want to be a preacher. He struggled against the call to the peril of his health, gave in and got well.



I found in an old hillbilly of the Blue Ridge Mountains a scholar who studied the Bible with serious intent all his life, talked with other preachers and men who studied serious questions in the Bible, studied deeply, such that all I could do was listen. He did not believe the earth was a round planet hurtling through space unimaginably fast, but it doesn't mean he was without knowldge. He was an incredibly intelligent man. Born in a priveleged class, he could easily have been CEO of a major corporation. He played old-time fiddle, banjo and guitar. Couldn't play them outside the house. Once he took up preaching he had to quit playing for dances. Singing, he had a singing voice from the soul of these mountains like Ralph Stanley.



Millard can be heard on an album CHILDREN OF THE HEAVENLY KING: Religious Expression in the Central Blue Ridge, recorded by the Library of Congress in the early 80s. It's a 2 cd set, and can be found at amazon.com for $16 + shipping. It's worth it. It's worth 10 x that. Millard and his church have 7 tracks on it, singing Jesus Is Coming Soon, When The Redeemed Are Gathering In, How Happy Are They, Must Jesus Bear The Cross Alone, a prayer and some preaching. It has other preachers and other churches singing in the different styles of the different churches in the region. It is a beautiful collection of what it calls itself, religious expression. The devotion I have to call spiritual, because it is only housed in the religious, Millard Pruitt was a monk to his Lord and Savior, his every thought, word and action in the presence of the Lord. It didn't mean he had to pretend to be something he wasn't. It meant he was all the more obliged to be himself, who he was, even when it meant alienating certain people, because he didn't bend his beliefs and opinions for no man.



Tom lived in the presence of his Lord the same as Millard did. It wasn't like God, Jesus, Savior, Lord, whatever you want to call it, was off paying attention somewhere else. Tom Pruitt lived in the actual presence of God. Tom was a liquor maker and a weekend drunk until one Monday morning when he was 36 he didn't remember anything about the weekend. He put down the liquor and gave his life to the Lord. Tom had it too. When he'd set to talking about scripture and Jesus, his talking took a rhythm like a preacher just before he's about to be overtaken by the spirit and he's off into preaching. Tom's face glowed pink when he talked like this, his pale blue eyes shone brilliant with joy or grace, whatever you'd want to call it. He'd get on a roll at the verge of taking off preaching, and he'd stop. He'd say, "I wasn't called to preach. I don't have the gift." I can see in retrospect that God landed me in Tom Pruitt's neighborhood, in the proximity of one of His monks. Tom indeed was a monk. He could sit in his rocking chair that didn't rock, spit backer in a Maxwell House instant coffee jar on the floor beside his chair, straight down the center of the opening every time, and stare at the wall in front of him all day every day and never be bored. Day after day for years. Tom quit going to church over overhearing a preacher lie about him. "He told a lie."



Jr Maxwell was every bit as devout as Millard and Tom, lived just as much in the presence of God, though in his own way. Jr thought the ten commandments sufficient guide to live by and knew too much about what preacher say and what preacher do. He didn't respect preachers, but for a few. He liked to listen to old-time preaching on the radio every once in awhile, but not often. He read church as not the way. Jr lived his life as himself, which is sufficient unto God. He was what God made him and there was no need to act any other way before God. Jr had a drink of liquor every day since he was 14. His daddy gave him his first liquor, taught him to respect it, not make it a taboo. It was his daily medicine that cured certain ills, and when he wanted to get drunk, all he had to do was have a few more drinks and pass out. One day he said to me, "I don't know if I'm going to heaven or hell." I said, "Hell wouldn't have you." He looked at me funny for a moment, questioning in his mind if I meant that the way it sounded, then he saw my meaning and a smile came to his face.



*

WALK THAT LONESOME VALLEY

joines cemetery whitehead



Stopped by Jr's grave yesterday. The death date still has not been put on the stone. I'll have to take care of that myself. I'll go to somebody who does that and get it done. Fell through the cracks, as they say. In the photo above, the view from Jr's grave, the mountain on the left is the Peak. It's on Blum land. Jr's homeplace was to the left of the Peak. The little white church in lower right that looks like it's sitting on the tombstone is Liberty. Over the last years they've been doing quite a lot toward the restoration and upkeep of the church Jr and Elvira Crouse grew up in. Thanks to the churches keeping records of baptisms we were able to find the date in 1935 Jr was baptized, meaning he was saved, which eased the minds and hearts of many of his friends and relatives. When I learned the date and was able to tell it, the relaxation that came over several was visible. It was a measure of how much they cared.



It's odd to think of Jr in the grave. While he was living, we didn't know which of us would go first. Whitehead without Jr is a very different Whitehead. I delivered one of the cds of his music to Ray Wooten today, visited with him a little bit. Ray plays bluegrass rhythm guitar, used to make music with Cleve, Jr and Art. At the dump, I ran into Doug McMillan, guitar picker and country singer at home and with friends, someone I know now because I knew Jr. Jr's friends have added quite a number to the people I'm happy to know in these here hills. I often think of what Elvira said the day Jr died, "Now Whitehead knows who you are." I thought I understood what she meant, more or less intuitively. Since then, I've seen what it means. All the ones I know in Whitehead are as wide open friendly with me like they were with Jr. I treasure it. Part of what I was doing passing around the cd was thanking my new friends for their consideration. It gave me reason to go around and see them individually.



Conversation with nearly everyone I saw today on a run to town was curious about the new radio station owner, wondering what was going to become of it. What I piece together from what I read in the paper and have heard, they'll continue with the obits, but probably not get any closer to the community than that. That's entirely uncertain. I'm thinking if they want to reject participation in the community, they'll go the way of the last bunch, a long, slow decline unto nothing. It doesn't matter to me what they do. I'll never listen to any of it, anyway. Probably will never turn it on out of curiosity. My feeling of the new owner is he likes to see himself in a corporate light, like CEO. I don't know. Don't want to know. I'd rather listen to NPR when I turn the radio on during the day. I won't pay enough attention to the station for what I think or don't think of it to matter the most miniscule iota. I don't even know if I wish them well after what I witnessed second-hand of the takeover. I remember listening to Tom Pruitt on money preachers. He spoke my own thoughts and feelings in eloquent brief. I asked him for what he thought of the radio preacher, George Farmer, who preached on WCOK every day. Tom's answer, "Money preacher." The money part voided the preacher part. That was all he had to say. It brought to his mind memories of other money preachers along his way.



I came to these mountains with that way of seeing it. It was such an unpopular concept to disregard preachers who do it for pay, favors, wealth. There again, in America the measure of the value of what you do is the money you make. The preacher that makes the most money, Billy Graham for example, is perceived as the best, which increases his following, especially after he counsels presidents, and fattens his coffers. I was surprised and heartened the day Tom let me know his views on the matter. As I've lived in the mountains, the number of people I know who disregard money preachers is quita a large number. That's the old-time way. And it's gone away. We're in television culture now and tv culture is all about money. This is a major reason I don't cohabit with tv. When it gets down to it, the more money a preacher makes, the more fraudulent his status in my way of discerning trees by their fruits. Jr didn't have any use for any of them. I'm inclined to that direction, myself, but have known some I know in my heart were true and actually were called by the Holy Spirit. Millard Pruitt, primarily. His power in the pulpit was the truth that borrowed his vocal chords for a little bit. He was not uncommon back in the old days.



I paid a great deal of attention to Elder Millard Filmore Pruitt. I saw him an old-baptist monk. He was hard shell in his beliefs and I was not. But it was no problem for me that he saw it the hard shell way. I just don't see anything that way, I hope. One doesn't meet many people whose every moment is in the presence of the Lord. Millard was. Tom was. Bessie Brooks was. Malissie Pruitt was. These people were examples to me that the mountain old-time religion is a true path up the great high mountain. These are some of the characteristics you hear people bring up when they remember grandma and grandpa, the most devout people you could ever know. At the same time grandma was just a woman and grandpa just a man. They went about their lives here on the earth with the spirit as their guide, neither above nor below anyone around them. Good neighbors. They lived good lives. They lived through deep sorrows. Death was not kept out of sight in their world. It was right there with you all the time. Graves were dug with picks and shovels. The bodies were cleaned and dressed at home. They lived so much closer to the bone than we do now, their way of living can't even be imagined for comparison. I tend to find tv culture lacking, considerably, in relation to the old-time ways. When it's gone, books, movies, what have you, none of it will have It. Thanks to old-time fiddle music and hymns, some of that old-time spirit continues to live as a subculture in the new culture guided by tv.



The devotion I saw in the old-time mountain people during my early years in the hills, the late 70s and the 80s, was such that it put me in awe of the culture that had in its people so many brilliantly lit-up souls living in the light. I don't mean anything less than that. They know what they believe through experience. Jr carried the tradition in himself. He stayed away from church, however, drank to his own satisfaction, lived his life to his satisfaction, not to some preacher's judgment he doesn't even respect as a man. He went his own way. He carried his devotion in his heart. I always saw it. It's part of what I most respected in him. Jr's heart was right. He spoke through the heart to everyone. He lived his life in the light, too, though kept his spiritual beliefs entirely to himself. He said the Ten Commandments were his guide. Enough said. It's all there. Jr lived a devout life while allowing himself to go ahead and be who he was, play banjo in a bluegrass band, keep his blood purified with the best white liquor around, he was definitely particular about the quality, and live his life the best he knew how. I saw in Jr a man like myself going his own way, making his own decisions, not adhering to anybody else's agendas, walking his own path. In the time I took care of him I saw him the brother monk in the monastery of our way of living in relation to the Most High. If I were to write of the time with Jr as a play, it would be 2 monks in a modest country house, the older one dying, the other one making it possible for the older monk to die in his own bed, which the care giving monk believed was as important as the older monk held it to be.

THE WOMAN IN RED

cloud cover hovers over pine swamp







Driving up Wolf Branch Road, and if you know the road you know what I mean by up, at the top I saw this great panorama of this section of Pine Swamp. Pulled off the road to get this picture of such a great cloud display, benevolent clouds with neither rain nor lightning in them, clouds that filter the sunlight's glare. Above is just a section of the panorama at the top of Wolf Branch Road. Pine Swamp Road runs from one end to the other in the picture. It was just ahead from where I pulled off the road. This particular view is a bit undramatic where landscape is concerned, but the clouds more than make up for the absence of dramatic hills.



Back in the car, I drove on up to Pine Swamp Road and turned left toward home. At the top of the rise in the road New Salem church house caught my eye, pristine as a jewel. The sun was on it full front, like the light was coming out of the wall. It shaded the features nicely, making it articulate in the spotlight. I thought of stopping to take another picture, but the light was so intense, I thought it might come out blue like pictures of snow in sunlight. I probably would have done well to that, because it's been on my mind ever since. I've never seen it as beautiful as it was today.



Seeing New Salem, a memory came to mind from a quarter century ago when New Salem was Regular Baptist. It was a night during a revival, late in the revival, maybe Friday night. Elder Millard Pruitt was the one preaching. He had the spirit that night and everybody was feeling good. When the preaching was over, the hand shaking began, everybody singing, and the hand shaking spontaneously made a circle. Everyone kept on singing when the hand shaking was done. No one offered to leave. Everyone, maybe 20 or so people, stood in the circle singing and singing, song after song. In a little bit somebody got happy. Directly across the circle from where Brother Millard was standing a woman of 250 to 300 pounds in a Coca-Cola truck red skin tight jumpsuit, throwing arms all the way wide open to clap her hands indicating she was on her way to out of control. Her brunette hair had either just been to the beauty shop or it was a wig. I've never seen the woman before nor since.



She took a bead on Millard and set out across the space inside the circle hopping like a red Michelin woman with all her undergarment lines pronounced like they were on the outside, hopping like a frog as in the child's game May I? Take 6 frog leaps clapping. Every time her feet hit the floor she clapped her hands. Her weight went to the bottom as soon as she hit the floor and sprang back up carrying her with it into the next frog leap. Millard Pruitt weighed less than a hundred pounds. Preaching drained his energy drastically. He was a frail shut-in who spent his days in a recliner after several heart attacks. I saw her weight hopping in voluminous bounds across the inside of the circle and realized Millard was in trouble.



In my mind's eye, I saw her engulfing his entire head between her breasts, him loving it, her flinging all her weight on him expecting him to catch her like she was 4 years old hopping to daddy. I saw her take hold of him and take him over backwards, her grip tighter than ever, and the next thing an ambulance carrying him to the funeral home. He could not have survived it. I slipped out of the circle and planted my feet firmly behind Brother Millard and put my hand up to catch him when she struck. She did just as I saw, buried his face between her breasts, engulfed him with her big arms. He lurched backwards and I pressed my hand firmly against his back holding him up, inconspicuously as possible, giving him some flex too so she wouldn't knock the wind out of him. He would have died for sure if she'd fallen on top of him. He thanked me later, said he thought he was a gonner.



At the bottom of the hill on Pine Swamp Road where it turns right is a stretch of road before the left turn onto Brown Road at what used to be Cary Brown's dairy. In the middle of that little bit of a straight stretch I saw a dead possum on the road a 25 years ago. Next day another dead possum lay flattened beside it. I thought: Romeo and Juliet Possum. Every time I pass that place I think of those possums and feel a second of sorrow. I forget that roadkill animals and birds have mates that miss them, same as cats and dogs have humans missing them. A little ways up Brown road I pass the place where the truck self-immolated leaving a black stain on the gravel. Memories of flames shooting 10 feet out the window both sides. Memories of buying a fire extinguisher at Farmer's Hardware to carry inside the car, not in the trunk as recommended on the packaging. It's probably sound counsel for someone with a car several people have access to, kids, leaving kids alone in the car. Trunk is a good place for certain circumstances. For my circumstance, it goes within easiest possible reach, the armrest between the seats. Out of sight. Fits perfectly. Easy access.



Pass Green Mountain on the left, the mountain Jr named the Green Mountain Boys for, where the fire tower used to be, replaced by cell phone towers, now a Cuban subdivision, one of several around the county. I climbed the fire tower in my first years here when I was a bedazzled tourist in my new home. It did, indeed, have a view all the way around. Leave the pavement and head up the mountain on the gravel road with ferns on both banks of the road, trees, shaded around the first curve almost dark from thickness of the trees, and eyes adjusting to the shade after being wide open in full sunshine. New houses, new houses. The subdivision along Air Bellows Gap Road. My road next to the old house that is one of the original houses on the mountain that continues to stand, the only house I like, the house the other people up here want torn down, except Allan Joyce, because it's an eyesore. The mountain azaleas along the winding road down the hill are in full flower. Before the road was paved, every time I drove down the hill on my road seeing the little valley I live in, I would think this was the most beautiful place I'd ever been. Since they tore down the trees and raised the road 2 feet, widened it and paved it, making it a highway and a weekend racetrack in the summers, it's just another road. But, before it was a gravel road it was a pair of wagon tracks and before that a horse and foot path.