HURRYING SLOWLY ON GLADE VALLEY ROAD

air bellows drive-thru museum of art

 

Driving home from a day at the races and the last quarters of multiple football games, North Carolina panthers stomped Green Bay, I was on Glade Valley Road, taking it easy in the dark, Sunday night, nearly no cars on the road, running between 25 and 35, taking the curves comfortably, a two-line verse came to mind,

 

     I like driving Glade Valley Road

     it's crooked as the back of a running blacksnake.

 

I could not think of a third line and left it there. It woke up appreciation in me for the road I know so well. The road is all curves. Not a good road to drive in a hurry unless it turns you on to take the curves at the edge of the possible keeping it in the road. Every winter, just about every other weekly paper has something about a car or pickup leaving Glade Valley Road "too fast for conditions." When you hit black ice, any motion is too fast for conditions. Take out a fencepost or two, slam into a tree, roll down a bank.

 

air bellows drive-thru museum of art

 

Glade Valley Road is a dangerous road to take lightly. You go over the top of a hill at 50mph and out of sight just beyond the top of the hill you face a bank that goes straight up with a big black arrow in a yellow rectangle pointing to the right. The road makes a right angle turn. If you don't know the turn is there, you'll stand up on the brake pedal when you see it.  I disliked the road for a long time for trying to over drive the road. I learned if I let 35 be my top speed, relax and flow with the road itself, hurry slowly, I like the road for its beautiful scenery both sides of the road, old farm houses, corn fields, pumpkin fields and a postcard picture view of Bullhead Mountain. The state road crews take good care of the road. The double yellow lines down the center have yellow reflectors every twenty feet. The white lines at both sides are fresh and articulate. It is important to keep the lines bright for frequent fogs. They help in the rain too.

 

air bellows drive-thru museum of art

 

I have grown weary of driving the road in rain after dark. It seemed like for months it rained every Sunday for my drive over Glade Valley Road. I don't like driving it in the dark during rain. The road is too unpredictable. No matter how many times I've driven it, it still has surprises. The worst at night in the rain is turning right onto Hwy 21, driving a short ways and having to turn left onto Dewitt Road. The road is not marked well and I can never see it until I'm up on it. If I approach it too fast I may miss it. In the dark I don't want to miss it, a ditch is on either side. The drive along Dewitt Road parallels Bullhead Mountain, another road of nice scenery from one end to the other. It meets Mahogany Rock Road I took around to the Parkway. I decided to take the last five miles of the way home on the Parkway. The night was clear, no chance of fog. I know these roads as well as I know the path to the mailbox. I drive over these roads enchanted that I know them so well, that they are a part of my everyday life.

 

air bellows drive-thru museum of art

 

I drove through the Air Bellows Drive-thru Museum of Art slowly, crept through it enjoying the splash of colors, a tunnel under the Parkway where Air Bellows Gap Road makes a sharp U-turn to meet the Parkway. Driving through the tunnel earlier, a couple of guys about my age, flatlanders in a gigantic SUV were far enough behind me I did not see them. In the daylight creeping through the tunnel, I stopped several times to snap a picture. They pulled up behind me and stopped outside the tunnel waiting for me to move on. I thought, what the hell, I'm not hurrying for them. I kept on like I was doing until I was done. They didn't seem to mind. I imagined them saying, "It's that TJ feller they say is an artist, lives down there with the donkeys." "I hear he don't have nothin to do with nobody that aint from these hills." "Yeah, I aint heard of nobody that likes him." "I hear he's an arrogant bastard." "I aint had nothin to do with him, myself. I'm just going by what people say." "I hear he's a liberal." "Yeah, I heard that myself." "Probably a atheist too." "No two ways about it." 

jimmy Johnson chases brad Keselowski

 

 

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THE TROJAN HORSE AND GLADE VALLEY ROAD

brice marden 

The sky is turning light. The sun is not yet up, but on its way. Mind realizes I've not slept all night and am wider awake than if I had slept. In the bed writing a short story in my mind until telling self I need some sleep. I turned the radio on all night BBC. Most often, the chatter sends me into sleep within two minutes. Not this time. Listened to Putin's popularity rating, republicans continuing attempted murder of Obama care, assassination one of their specialties, smoke-screen news covering up the real news. My interest in the news is waning fast. I've come to see that even the network news that is not the Fake channel gives misleading news. In this time when the Fake channel has made news into absurd fiction, the other channels follow suit wanting to compete for the  most exciting presentation. All of them gloss over and cover up police state. NPR cannot be counted on anymore for news. I listen to NPR, now that the Koch Bros own it, like I watch cartoons. I take what I hear for smokescreen of what I don't hear. Much talk about how terrible it is for the families of the two NY cops shot down. There is never a mention of how terrible it is for families of unarmed young black men killed every day someplace in USA by cops. Their families come up and they're discredited, made to look like jungle bunnies that rob dumpsters. Gradually, I'm learning to pay the news little mind. I like to watch the processes, how things work out, to read the patterns of the political trends. I'm learning to withdraw emotional attachment to one side or the other. I can't involve self with any kind of attachment. 

brice marden

Watched a two and a half hour documentary of Franklin Delano Roosevelt I found to be good history. I was paying attention to how he worked a crowd, his charisma, his intelligence, noting that everything he put in place, the John Birch right wing party, funded by Koch Bros and others of like mind, has fastidiously  been dismantled since the Trojan Horse Reagan of 1980. We the people are now what I've come to think of as citizen criminals. It means, for me, that we are now regarded criminals because we are citizens. Cops have become police state bullies, as always happens with police state. Their role is to serve and protect the rich and the corporations "too big to fail." We the people don't even have a lobbyist. In 2005 this police state Supreme Court declared the police are only about "law enforcement," not to serve and protect. Then why do they still have the fake slogan on their car doors? I don't want to think about this anymore, though when I see it spelled out in front of my face, it's difficult to ignore. I don't want to ignore context and how things work. I'd say this comes under the world we live in the way it is. This is the political world I live in. I have to accept it as the nature of that kind of reality, the way things are, be aware of this fake reality as such and let it go by, not be of it. This has been a problem all my life, how to live in a fake world where denial is the culture of white people.

brice marden

I went to bed after writing the above, too weary to go on. Slept all day. Up now at sunset. Stayed up too late last night, drove home between 12:30 and 1:00, then couldn't sleep. Driving at night has begun to mess with my eyes. Glade Valley road, crooked as as a running snake, mostly has little to no cars. Last night, Christmas, I found at least twenty cars on the way home. Headlights blare in my eyes. Looks like everybody has their brights on. Going into a sharp curve with three cars coming through it the other direction, one after the other with bright lights on, can be disorienting. I watch the white line on my side of the road, focus my attention there unconcerned as possible about the oncoming cars. I tend to want to steer too far to the right to avoid them. I tell self, they have to stay in their lane, like I stay in mine. One of them crosses the center line and plows into me, nothing I can do--I'm in my lane. Air bag. Glade Valley road is not a good one to drive fast on. Surprise curves just over the top of a rise that you can't see until you're in them. The first several times on the road I was hitting the brakes often to stay on the road. I've found a good pace at 30-35 mph where the car can flow with the road at this speed, brake seldom, and glide through the curves with no problem. I feel more relaxed driving at this rate than going up to fifty in a short stretch, then hit the brakes to go through a curve at 20. I've driven GV road in every weather condition by now, including snow and ice. I've learned how to drive the road, making it an easy drive, rolling with the road itself. I resisted the road for quite awhile, until I learned to flow with it instead of attempting to drive it like other roads. Used to think it a hateful road, and now I like driving it, find it relaxing.

brice marden

The kids were happy with their presents. Vada had been center of attention all day, first half with daddy's family, second half with mama's family. I went by after they'd done all the family get-togethers. Vada had been buried in presents. She loved her little earrings. First thing she said after she saw them, "What else do you have for me?" Cheyenne took the back seat all day, was quiet and had gone inward. She loved her dragonfly necklace, put it on immediately. Later, when we had a moment together, I said to her, "The necklace is all yours, only yours, not anybody else's." She said, "What if I come back and it's not in the box?" I said, "You taking it home?" She said, "No, leaving it here." I assured her it will be safe at daddy's house. I felt so deeply for her having to be in the background Christmas day, all attention on Vada. The situation is such I'd like to snap my fingers and make it right for her, but can't do it. I was grateful to Carole for suggesting jewelry. At the end of the day, Cheyenne received her prize. There isn't much I can do for Cheyanne to help her issues. It made my day to give Cheyenne something that meant so much to her. I went into it wanting her to have something she could value, a nice piece of jewelry, of which she has none, By the end, I was almost sorry I'd deepened her sadness, gave her something to worry about somebody taking. I saw that she is working things out for herself. She's learned she has to take care of herself. I'd like her to grow up to be an independent woman. I feel like her experiences in this part of her life are pointing her in that direction. I'd like, in what time I have left, to encourage in Cheyanne her own inclination to look out for herself

brice marden himself

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READING THE POEMS OF LOUISE GLUCK

robert motherwell

Today I gave myself a rare treat, one I did not know was necessary until it happened. It's been so relentlessly cold the last few days and nights, I needed to be warm, relaxed and warm. My neighbors who are away right now have a house across the road. I needed some time to sit back with a book in a warm house and I wanted a hot bath. Put clothes in the washing machine and ran the bath water as hot as I could take it, filled the tub as high as it would go without overflowing when I sat down, remembering I displace more water now than in the past. I'd pre-heated the house, making it comfortable. The floor was warm enough to walk barefoot. It would not do to take a hot bath in a cold room with a cold floor. Today I was taking a time-out from the cold. I sat down in the tub and the water rose appreciably. Feet were glowing warm in a short time, blood circulation. Warm feet was the greatest blessing of all. It felt like sitting in a sauna, the heat even all over. Almost nodded off a few times. I wanted to stay in the water on and on, but it started cooling down after a good while. I was surprised at how well the tub held the water's heat. I started getting restless. Dried off, dressed and went to the living room, sat on a warm sofa and picked up the book I'd brought to spend some time in the warm with, Louise Gluck's, Poems 1962-2012. Gluck requires close attention, focus, from word to word. She's a tight, compact poet who uses every word deliberately. Maybe I read a dozen poems, each of them half a dozen times, reading them over and over until I felt the flow of the language and followed the progression freely. From one of several poems titled Matins:

 

                          are you like the hawthorn tree,

          always the same thing in the same place,

          or are you more the foxglove, inconsistent, first springing up

          a pink spike on the slope behind the daisies,

          and the next year, purple in the rose garden?

 

louise gluck

 

I lay back on the sofa reading, bare feet up enjoying the warm air, mind enjoying the verse of Louise Gluck. I bought her first book in the late 1960s, Firstborn. She was not what you'd call a Sixties poet. Pop culture was not her ambition. She received quite a lot of positive attention, a Young American Poet of the moment. I liked her concise style with language. A quarter century later I found another of her books, Ararat, which I loved. In one of the poems I read today she wrote of standing before a window speaking to her other self reflected in the glass. The poem was one part of self talking to the other part of self. Her poems are often addressed to the other known as you. Sometimes you is another person, loosely identified, and sometimes you is another part of herself, like the mirror image self. Bob Dylan uses the device of you for another person and another part of self. I've thought several Bob Dylan songs conversations with himself. Sometimes with Dylan and with Gluck, you is both other and self at once. Her poems have a presence for me, such that each one is like a painting. Each one is uniquely itself like abstractions by Robert Motherwell. The poems are intimately personal, subjective, without being confessional. I read the poems over and over, went from last line to first and through it again, each time feeling the relationship of the words with each other, seeing it new each time, sometimes slightly new and sometimes radically new. From first reading to last I am in search of the poem Louise Gluck wrote. In some ways, I'd say she'd be a very difficult poet to translate into another language. The clarity of her word usage would be sublime for a translator, but then you get into the subtle nuances and it kinda gets past word meanings.

 

robert motherwell

 

I spent two hours with maybe a dozen poems. I wasn't explicating them or trying to figure them out. I was reading them looking for their feeling, images, what she was saying. The academic way I learned to read poetry was a good education, but I don't read like that anymore. I like to read a poem as a work of art to be taken on sight like a painting on a wall in a show. I like to read it for the story it is. I like to read a poem with the same eye that I watch a movie. Gluck's stories are not ones with beginning, middle and end, nor are they dramas. They are quiet observation. Each poem is a smooth ride through her thinking process. I like the quiet her poems ease into my mind. The lines pull me through the poems not by drama, but by the progression in the poem, riding its rhythm. I feel like she has a fine feeling for rhythm. Her rhythm is walking rhythm. I even feel like her poems are brief Pinter plays. I'll put here a full poem to give an idea of how she writes a complete poem. This is not to say all her poems are shaped like this one. Some have long lines and short stanzas. The poem itself determines it's physical expression on the page.

 

          SCILLA, by Louise Gluck

 

          Not I, you idiot, not self, but we, we---waves

          of sky blue like

          a critique of heaven: why

          do you treasure your voice

          when to be one thing

          is to be next to nothing?

          Why do you look up? To hear

          an echo like the voice

          of god? You are all the same to us,

          solitary, standing above us, planning

          your silly lives: you go

          where you are sent, like all things,

          where the wind plants you,

          one or another of you forever

          looking down and seeing some image

          of water, and hearing what? Waves,

          and over waves, birds singing.

 

robert motherwell

 

The buzzer on the dryer was my signal to wrap it up, fold the laundry and return home. It felt like I had just begun with Louise Gluck's poems. I could have sat with her hours more. And will. It's my book. I brought it home. Hers are internal journeys. I follow the lead of the words to see where they go, a winding trail that is never predictable. It's like driving Glade Valley Road; surprise turns left or right, the steering wheel always in motion. Attempting to drive the road too fast it becomes a struggle. Settling into it at 30 and 35 mph, it's a smooth flow going with the hills and curves. Louise Gluck's poems are a struggle to keep up with in a hurry, but slow down to the rate of flow in the poem and it becomes an easy, lilting flow something like following the dog, walking a deer trail through the woods. I come out of a round with her poems with my head feeling as clear as during a walk among the trees. It was a good cleansing today, body, mind and soul.  

 

robert motherwell

 

 

 

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