FORTY YEARS ON A BACK ROAD

tom pruitt's house today

 

Forty years ago, this day, this minute, 9:20pm, I was driving on the Parkway in the densest fog there ever was. I understand some of the fog in the Pacific Northwest is thicker. Absolute white like inside a cave is absolute black. The fog that night was dense. I'm used to it now, though it is never easier to drive in than it was that night, my first experience. Could only use first gear and creep. Had to hang head out the open window and look down at the tire and hold it next to the double yellow line in dim light. The fog absorbed the headlights in a white-out. I think of those nights driving when it is so dark it's pitch black, the headlights seem to go only half as far as usual. Stay in the rhythm of keeping the tire next to the yellow lines. Until a place where a road came into the parkway or entrance/exit to an overlook where the yellow lines ended for a space of about thirty feet. I never knew if I'd find the yellow lines again. I wondered if loaded pickup was headed toward the ditch and down the side of a mountain. Then the yellow lines appeared, I'd been on track. Ten or more years ago the maintenance crews painted segmented lines through the open spaces, a welcome assist.

 

the goat rock from waterfall road

 

I mused at how interesting it was to enter my new life, my commitment to the unknown, to chance, passing through a dense fog the last five miles. So smitten by the symbolism of it, I embraced the fog as a passageway into a new life of I did not know what. I had committed by giving self no option. The decision was settled. Whatever hardship went with it, I'd learn as time went by. I knew it would be intense hardship. No running water in the house, and an outhouse. Took water out of the creek behind the house in buckets. That wasn't anything. The first month, the month of November, cold to somebody from coastal South Carolina, frequent snow on the ground in the mornings, Tom gave me a job with a bush axe for clearing an acre of saplings and briars that had grown up in a meadow he wanted to return to meadow. I realized later he gave me this job to see how long I'd last before turning around and going home. I used it for boot camp. I wanted to work myself into shape and find the rhythm of hard labor, my purpose in going to the mountains to be a caretaker of a farm with beef cattle, totally inexperienced. 

 

waterfall road the backside

 

Somehow I knew without knowing that the mountains would be the place I live out my life. Looking at living my life, the mountains are the place to do it. Looking at making a living, the mountains are not such a good place to be. I could have found work that rewards a college degree, but did not want to wear a tie, work in an office and tell people what to do. I wanted to commit to hard labor. I had fallen in with Meher Baba a year before, which turned my inner direction 180 degrees around. I see my life an arrow shot straight up, going away from its source full speed. Momentum wears itself out, the arrow stops, falls back, turns around and flies full speed returning to its source. The first year was the turning of the arrow's direction. Most curiously to me of all is that these mountains are my blood source, which I didn't know for the first 25 years, as well as what I call the home of my soul. And that's not symbolism. It is best I came here from outside. I could not live here after growing up here. Much as I love the culture, I would need to distance myself from its control. As it is now, I honor the culture without it having controlling interest in my life. I've let the culture be my graduate school.

beside waterfall road the backside

This house was the Air Bellows School house. I've known well a handful of people who went to school and have met and spoken with another handful. Altogether, I've known ten people who went to school here. I've met people who were saved here at revival meetings they had sometimes in schoolhouses in the old days of horses and wagons. I feel a reverence for the house considering what all has gone on that these boards experienced. I feel a reverence for the house as itself without any mental references. It was constructed by the people of the community, some of them carpenters. The simplest possible construction, so simple it is almost in the Japanese style. This spot of ground is, indeed, the home of my soul. After living here around twenty-five years, I had a feeling that seemed like it came from higher self, that I now have my PhD in mountain culture. Not an academic title from reading, rather experiential, first hand, listening to old people tell their lives, working with mountain people, drinking with them and going to church with them, learning their theology, incorporating what I assessed the best of it into my life. Leave off the male hierarchy in the churches and I'm all with their theology, though in different words from what they use. I am post-round earth, post-evolution, post-the science of psychology, post-the 20th Century renascence, the new classical age for the future. I regard that unimportant. I was with old man Tom Pruitt, it's all in the red letters. The rest of it is history.  

the goat rock from waterfall road the back side

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

LOSING MY RELIGION

vada

by cheyanne

Forty years ago I started a new life with a new vision and new purpose. I came to the mountains a year later to adjust my life, my thinking to the new vision. The vision simply amounted to: God is. Just that turned me from drifting without vision to purpose. I wanted to live quietly in the mountains to assess my new insight and tune myself to the new vision. When I say, God is, I don't mean a rule book a thousand pages long, every rule starting with Don't. I mean God without systems of dogma, without commandments. Love is what God is, and that was a tall order for me. It needed some consideration. I didn't know shit about love. The emotional climate in the home I came up in was fear and punishment. These were justifications for absence of love, in the name of love. I hit you every day because I love you. I berate your every move and word because I love you. I don't want to hear anything you have to say because I love you. It's for your own good. This version of love made me into someone who distrusted love, and had so little experience with love that I was twisted up in knots like really bad hair. I was so shy a kid, I was pathetic. Shyness was the first issue I had to address when I entered the world on my own. I conquered it, but still have a debilitating shyness within that I've learned to accept and live with. There are some parts of my nature I simply have to accept. My generation helped shape who I am. I found in mountain culture a people who accepted themselves as they were, with an attitude of fuck you if you don't like it. A liberating attitude. It was so long ago I adopted this attitude, I couldn't give it an age or a year. It may have been the moment when I left the church I'd been going to. During the time of the first Saturday night meeting I missed as a non-member, I was jamming at a concert of Siouxsie and the Banshees followed by Jane's Addiction, two of my very favorite bands, thinking there is a much better spirit here than there was there.

vada

by cheyanne

I left the church because I had grown out of my own negative mindedness and found self surrounded by negative mind such that it became suffocating. I loved the people in the church. One day an old black man fallen into dementia, whose farm surrounded the church lot, who grew up going to this church before it was sold to white people, came to the church house one Sunday morning in the middle of a meeting, dressed up in a beautiful suit for church. It's said people with dementia want to go Home, the place they grew up. I suspected old man Sabe was returning to Home in the dream mind he was living in. He sat in the same place I sat my first time in the church. Sabe was as humble a man as I've known. Sabe was a good man all the way around. And no one in the church acknowledged his existence. At hand shaking time, I went straight to Sabe. I'd have welcomed him if his mind was right. I'd come to know Sabe over several years, appreciated deeply who Sabe was. He was a simple, old, black farmer in a world of white people that all looked down on niggers. His wife had recently been taken to a nursing home. He was so addled that he soon followed. I felt like God had sent an angel to the church when I saw Sabe at the door, hat in hand, waiting for permission to enter. Preacher said, Come on in, Sabe. My heart glowed seeing Sabe was visiting his Home church in his dream state. I was glad to see him. Hand-shaking time at the end of the meeting, I shook his hand first, honored to shake Sabe's hand, my respect for him was so high. Everyone acted like he wasn't there. I went into shock. Everybody knew Sabe. Everybody liked Sabe. Or acted like they did. Everybody knew his wife was gone and could see his condition. Everybody knew Sabe gave the white people's church a piece of his land for the cemetery. Gave. 

vada

by cheyanne

On the issue of love your neighbor as yourself, it didn't take much figuring to see Sabe Choate, whose land went all the way around the church, who lived in the next house up the road, a neighbor. The light in my heart for the church went out that Sunday morning. I tried not to let it go out, but it was like willing a dead body back to life. It never came back. I was not comfortable among them anymore. Then came the morning on the way to church I put my hand on the screen door to push it open and my hand could not push. I stood with my hand on the screen door unable to move. I said to self, You don't have to go. I relaxed, closed the door and stayed home, feeling good about it. I knew the light was out and was not coming back on. I talked to myself, saying this is their culture, they are Southern Appalachian people, I am not here to change them, I am a guest in their community. Up to that time, I had allowed them who they were, as they allowed me who I was. I had a hard time accepting they could be so blatantly indifferent in their own church meeting. The difference was I saw Sabe a dark complected human being. I saw him closer to a true "Christian" than any one of the white people in the church. Afterward, I felt like Sabe was the Christ-like one and the people in the church were saying, Crucify him, he aint nothin but a nigger. As much as I was with accepting others as they are, I could not associate with people to praise God, who look so far down on the humblest and most gracious man I'd ever met. I did not want to hold them to Civil Rights laws or anything. The utter rejection of a respectable human being, respectable in more ways than staying out of prison, struck me deeper than I knew at the moment. 

grumpy old bastard and cheyanne make silly faces

by cheyanne

After the meeting, when I gathered myself together from the shock, I felt glad I had gone to Sabe first to shake his hand; everybody in the church shook the hand that touched a nigger's hand. It gave me such delight, I didn't like having such feelings about the people I'd felt so comfortable with the day before. I told myself it was not right thinking to hold them to my way of seeing. I was a guest in their culture; it was not my place to expect they think like me. I was among them to learn, not to teach. My second winter in the mountains I took a job to get through the winter working with several people from Away, like me. I'd lived intimately among mountain people by then. One of them from Raleigh told me it's good I came to the mountains educated so I can teach these ignorant mountain people something. I thought, Man, you don't even know what you're talking about. I did not waste my breath explaining I'm here to learn, not to teach. First thing I learned, I can't teach anybody of these mountains anything. I needed them to teach me. But I'm glad he said it, it articulated for me that I was, indeed, in awe of the intelligence of the mountain people. I still am after thirty-eight years, more than ever. You don't see it from the outside. You have to be inside to see it. Mountain people don't do anything for show but play fabulous music, a music inaccessible to outsiders. If you think there is nothing to playing a fiddle or banjo, try learning one. When you hear a fiddler cut loose with Chicken Reel or Forked Deer, you can be sure the one bowing the fiddle has a brilliant mind. It takes a good mind to learn a fiddle and a brilliant mind to master one. It's the same with a banjo. I came here to learn and it turned out my parachute landed me in the midst of a good education, learning by experience in a world foreign to any I'd known. I celebrate the life of Jr Maxwell first full moon of November at his grave to have a drink with him, a master who taught me the value of the people I live among and how to live my own values naturally. 

cheyanne herself

by cheyanne

*

TRUST AND RESPECT

beverly pepper

A couple weeks ago I was knocked off my track and have not yet found my way to get back in the flow. It came from trusting someone I found too late to be fickle. It's a valuable learning, though it didn't feel valuable at the time. I'll never count on this individual's word again. Good learning. Disillusionment equals enlightenment. I have been enlightened by said individual. I must get over being mad about it. It's an anger I can do nothing with but to learn from it, which frustrates the anger unable to express, then depresses me and saps my energy, turns a fun project into sour experience. I get mad at myself for getting mad. This leads to telling self to go ahead, be what I feel. Go ahead and be mad and let it run its course, let it wear itself out. Just don't get stupid. My mind is in a gloom, stays in a gloom. I actually spoke it out loud today that I could start crying any minute. I call it impotent rage. Nothing I can do about it but let it be a good learning. This isn't the first and it won't be the last. It goes with living in this world. We learn by trial and error who we can and cannot trust. Burnt a good one, I don't go back for seconds. I keep it as a rule of thumb that I give the people around me the benefit of the doubt. Learning to withhold trust from particular individuals is one at a time, and it hurts every time. I've found that people who cannot be trusted small cannot be trusted big. I don't need to cut off association or even do anything to show my displeasure. I know to withhold trust. I can go on and be like usual. I'll never be as friendly as I have in the past. That part's dead. When I can't trust somebody it colors a whole lot. 

beverly pepper

I've even been asked, in the coffee shop, where else?, why trust is important to me. I couldn't answer. I couldn't imagine somebody who asked the question could understand an answer. I said something to get out of it, "I'm just peculiar like that." Respect is another of those words that have little meaning outside the world of the mountain people. Actually, it's from the mountain people I learned to value trust and respect. I was not always trustworthy. I came here with a city fickle nature, unconscious. I found that here in the Blue Ridge trust is absolute. It's all the way or not at all. It took me a little while, a few years at least, to become truly trustworthy. In the time I knew friend Jr Maxwell, I learned much about trust. He was someone who could be trusted absolutely. When I needed Jr's trust, I had it with assurance. I strove consciously to be as trustworthy to him as he was to me. I couldn't ask him if he trusted me. I had to show him I can be trusted in small things as well as large. At the end, weeks before leaving the body, before his mind drifted away, he told me I turned out to be the only one he could rely on. I was heartened I could give him someone to count on in his last year. I felt I learned about trust from a Master trust was important to. The one at the coffee shop, who questioned the importance of trust, wondered why it was an issue for me. Like what am I hiding, like something on the tv show, Law & Order. Trust is important to him; therefore, he's hiding something. Like in the Fundamentalist religion: rational thought equals doubt equals Satan. 

beverly pepper

What I mean by trust is basic. I buy fifty bales of hay from somebody who says he'll deliver it Thursday. I like to know that the one I'm talking with actually will show up on Thursday. Some do, some don't. First time is trial and error. Hay turns up the following Wednesday with, "Somethin come up," and I buy hay from somebody else next time. He brings it when he says he will and I buy hay from him next time. This is what I mean by basic trust. In the years of revenuers raiding stills and arresting people for making liquor, it became a code among everyone in the mountains you don't rat on anybody for any reason. The code doesn't hold anymore, the culture is gone. In the old hillbilly way of life, you kept what you knew about what somebody else was doing to yourself. It was so pervasive it became culture. It's a prison code, but I like it. I like that I've learned to live by it. I'm grateful to God I have the experience of learning about trust, living in a culture where it matters. People come in from outside and it's a foreign culture to them. It was to me. I took an interest in the culture and dove in head first. It took a little while to learn about trust in the absolute, but when you fall into a culture, it's like learning French living in France. I'm grateful I had the experience this lifetime to study the importance of trust. And I'm not talking in terms of money where trust is understood, but in everyday life, living in a world of others, every one unique in every way. I find it valuable to know who I can and cannot trust. I find it valuable to be trustworthy, too. Word gets around in a community when you can be trusted. It becomes part of your name. An old, old saying of my great grandpa's generation: a man is only as good as his word. It continues in the community of the mountain people who live at home. 

beverly pepper

The old mountain ways are gone, but they continue to live in the younger generations. My friends just turned thirty continue to value their grandpa's and grandma's ways. I like it when I see the lines of influence from the old mountain ways into the newer television generations. The old-time morality is long gone, and that can be a good thing in many ways. It's the time of breaking down of traditions all over the globe. It's the change that is the end of the world as we know (knew) it, the beginning of the world to come. I've learned to accept television as a quickening of the process of completely tearing down the old, making way for the new. It is shaping an international mind. The cell phone generation seems like as great a break with all that went before, history, the works, like the Dadaists did in 1915. The one I mentioned above who disappointed my trust is a twenty-something and from someplace else, who, I imagine, can spell trust, but knows nothing else about it. Span of attention of a cat chasing a laser dot, or so I've come to see what I thought before had foundation. Here I am holding a twenty-something to a code I live by for myself, a code I learned from people I respect for the human presence they were in the time I knew them. They became models for me. They were the age then that I am now. I listened to everything they said. Whether I agreed was neither here nor there. I learned about respect from the people who were the last of the old-time ways. I had the treasure in life to arrive in the mountains in time to see the tail end of the old ways, the people who grew up and lived the early part of their lives before electricity. Last week I said to my doctor, laughing at myself, "I still go by Nineteenth Century values." I gave so much attention to the values of the old ways as they were going out, I cannot expect the people around me, who are evolving away from values of any sort, to share my interest in such values as trust and respect. They're gone, but for in particular individuals. These are the people I like to know.    

beverly pepper herself

*

CHANGES AND MORE CHANGES

john cage

I see a brown thrasher has taken to perching on the wire fence where I give the donkeys carrots in the mornings. The ground the other side of the fence is trampled to dirt with donkey droppings mixed with the dirt, returned to dirt. It must be rich with bugs. I see birds lighting in the meadow going through the piles of donkey droppings for the bugs. Crows scour the meadow in early morning. The meadow has become rich in life forms. I see mushrooms I've never seen before, toadstools. Jack dug out a large circle of dust, tore up all the grass with his front hooves. I was looking at hiring somebody to trim his hooves, but now that the meadow has been his territory long enough it's home, he keeps his hooves trimmed himself. I've seen two of his dust circles he created before on the other side of the creek. All are on a place where the ground is sloped just a little bit. Perhaps it makes the rolling on his back easier to get up. Maybe if the ground were flat a donkey might fall into a turtle on its back situation, all four feet in the air and can't roll either way. Every move a donkey makes is fast, even when it looks like they're moving slow; these donkeys are fully attentive to every moment. They miss nothing. I'm imagining, since a donkey never likes to be vulnerable, the slope helps the donkey get up on its feet fast if need be. They process what they see in patterns of donkey thought, another world to me. I like all their experience with me to be benign, never a gesture that could be interpreted a threat. I don't kick them. They don't kick me. I like that Jack has made the necessary place for a donkey to roll in the dirt. Keeps the flies down, the parasites down. I'd like to do something for them to eliminate their parasites, but their role as bug magnets goes all the way back in their evolution, like fleas and dogs. I see the donkeys have their own bug-control knowledge by instinct from hundreds of thousands of years. Their swinging tails that look like windmills shoo the flies from their rear ends continually.

 

john cage

 

Flopping ears keep flying bugs in the air. I see flies now on Jack's and Jenny's faces and think of documentaries of African children in refugee camps with extended bellies and flies walking around on them. Of course it's a drag having flies walking around on your face, but we're spoiled humans who seal ourselves into air-tight houses and vehicles. We don't spend enough time in the world of insects to get used to them crawling on us. Farmers did. Farmers spent much of their time in silence. They lived in their minds, largely. The farmers I have known were deep thinkers. Their patterns of thinking were pre-Copernican, the Bible their intellectual and spiritual foundation. They don't seem intellectual to us, whose educations include knowledge of the solar system and galaxy, at least to some degree. We understand we are a part of the night sky, not separate from it. It's not because they're ignorant. William Blake was of the same cosmology and he was not ignorant. Because evolution was not covered in their education does not make them stupid. I knew incredibly intelligent men and women who did not believe the round earth theory. It didn't matter to me, or to them, that two cosmologies separated us, major generation gaps. Though I believed the earth to be a ball in orbit around another ball, I couldn't give evidence of it to somebody who didn't get it. Their way is right before your eyes, the obvious; the sun comes up, the sun goes down. The sun is in motion, not earth. I have a difficult time refuting the obvious. I don't know what to say after, It's really not like that. It's something quite different from the obvious. It's the opposite of the obvious. The difference I saw between us was that I saw myself included in the cosmos, the universe. They saw the universe, the cosmos separate from them. It's a big difference. It didn't matter that they watched television shows from satellites.

 

john cage

 

Much is yet unknown to the most advanced among us, cosmologies yet to be unveiled in passing time. Does that make us ignorant now? No more than it makes William Blake or Shakespeare ignorant. Our cosmologies characterize the time we live in. In 1614 there were brilliant minds all the way around the globe. They thought much the same as we do, though different because they had different experience. In my early years in the mountains, I saw the tail end of the people from the old-time ways. Grandpa wore bib overalls and a hat. Grandma wore a long dress and had long hair she kept twisted and pinned up out of the way. She was busy physically with a garden, the cooking, the cleaning up, taking care of everybody. They listened to square dance music. Next generation was the Hank Williams generation, blue jeans and white tshirts with a pack of Lucky Strikes or Camels rolled up in one or both of the sleeves. Skirts up to the knees and hairdos by permanent. Then the heavy metal, Southern rock country, and boys in cowboy boots and long hair. The babes in tight jeans and all lengths of hair. And the California surfer look, the kids in school. Since then, the last generation of bib overalls and long dresses is gone. The Hank Williams generation is on its way out. The surfer look-alike style faded away, replaced by the hip-hop rap style, gangsta, which, by now, has faded into the past. The cell phone generation now is dominant. Just before the cell phone was the Britney Spears look awfully common among teenage girls. These are the changes I have seen in microcosm in these hills. It's the end of the world as we know it every decade, it seems like, or even more frequently. Nascar is now the most watched sport on tv, according to surveys. That's a big change. The television network that purveys fake news as policy is now the most believed news source, as is Jon Stewart's Comedy Central news satire.

 

john cage

 

It is a very different culture we live in from when Little Richard was banging his piano singing Lu-ci-lle, you ran off and married but I-I love you sti-ll. I've kept up to a point. It's become dizzying. I've already been through nuclear threat. I'm not going to do it again. I don't even want to know what's pop anymore. I have my own music in the house from years of listening and buying, I don't need any more in my mind. There's no room. My music file is full. On facebook different people put up music videos. I see James Brown, Night Train, I don't need to play it. I hear it in my head as soon as I see the title. One that just now came to mind, The Jamies, Summertime. I was fifteen the summer it was new. It was in the time of Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On and El Ranch Rock, Splish-Splash, Peggy Sue. I didn't identify the song with summer time. I liked it the way I liked Rockin Pneumonia, The Jamies were a straight-up Fifties Lawrence Welk acceptable family singing group. I about fell over backwards when I looked them up on YouTube. The song had the zip of Gene Vincent's Be Bop a Lula and Carl Perkins' All Mama's Children. Year after year it was the summer song radio stations played for so long the music changed so much it just didn't work anymore except on oldies stations. The vitality the song had then, it has now. Little Richard's Lucille is still beautiful, as is Chuck Berry's Maybelline, as is Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here. Coming in at the very beginnings of rock & roll, I've had the great good fortune to follow the music through several periods of its evolution as a music. Music is coming in from all over the world, everything changing so fast that what we call rock is now one of many genres. I like my Blue Ridge Mountain home. It's time to hunker down a notch further, take a step inward, allow even the thrill of seeing Eric Cantor unseated in DC pass on by as nothing worth notice. The seasons are far more interesting than the dis- and mis-information we're fed through the media, even NPR. I've come to like silence about the best of any form of auditory experience. I like face to face and facebook communication with others. But in between, I like the silence with a wind chime tinging in a light breeze, tree frogs and katydids, the katydids in my ears, all singing together such that I don't know what's in here or out there.      

 

john cage himself

 

 

*

 

IN AND OUTSIDE THE BOX

big sur by tj worthington

 

Outside the box. How do I think outside the box in my art forms? Box. I remember a conversation with two musicians. They were looking for how to make music "outside the box." I was addressed for a thought on how to operate outside the box. My answer came automatically, though it sounded flippant to my ear, yet when I heard it, it answered my own questioning, "Don't have a box." It pretty much ended the subject in the conversation as it stumped all of us. It's the only way I can imagine thinking outside the box, musically, visually, or by mind, writing. I tend to have no problem with the box. I paint entirely inside the box, from realism to abstraction to sculpture. Everything I do has been done before. I look at the visual arts from Egyptian times to present, especially the 20th Century; everything has been covered from Impressionism to Conceptualism. Suppose I want to reduce everything visually to its most common element, like a square. Since Kazimir Malevich, hundreds of artists have painted squares. Malevich thought outside the box a hundred years ago. Outside the box, the avant-garde was the thread that ran through the art of the 20th Century. It drove the 20th Century. The only way I can see me painting "outside the box," post-20th Century, is like Marcel Duchamp did a century ago, play chess after painting the Mona Lisa of the Age. Or maybe, have a good idea and never do anything toward manifesting it. Just think it and forget it. I have an idea that's been done too. I'm still inside the box. Take my courthouse boxes for example. The visual refers to abstract expressionism and minimalism, seeming opposites fixed together as one. Consciously. Inside the box. A case could be made for feeding a carrot to a donkey as a "happening," or a temporary gesture without video record or audience, known to nobody but me, ever. That's inside the box, too.

 

big sur by tj worthington

 

I believe for myself, I see "the box" as all-inclusive as the universe. Outside my idea of the box is unknown nothingness. This means I am compelled to search in unknown nothingness for something in existence, even a thought. It aint there to be found. Where art in the realm of existence is concerned, the box I see is so vast that it is not a box anymore. A Zen monk's ink drawing of a grasshopper is still inside the box. A Tibetan temple with every surface sculpted and painted in the brightest colors ever, is still inside the box, quite literally. As a visual artist, I see that anything I can find that is "new" to the world of art won't be noticed as such anyway, especially a crayon drawing by a two year old. I have to look at my own box, what would be outside my own box, my own experience, my own visual expression. Several of the things I've made nobody ever sees. I do them to amuse myself. Like one just finished. The base is a block of wood three and a half inches square, the sawed-off end of a 4x4, treated with Tung oil. I used it to test printing with children's blocks, thinking I was going to paint the block of wood. I liked the marks and left them. Atop it sits half an old brick, a square, so old it grew a black patina. Its the same size as the block of wood, just not quite as tall. Atop it sits a chunk of cement I found at a building site where somebody laying cinderblock evidently lost a trowel load of cement that fell to the ground in a pile. The underside of it carries the print of the grass it landed on. I brought it home, soaked it in a half and half solution of latex robin's egg blue with water for probably a month. I wanted it to stain the cement, not put a coat of paint on it. Later I went over the rough parts with white oil-based paint. It looks to my eye like a splash in the ocean where the water splashes among big shoreline rocks, like Big Sur in my mind. Hail yeah, maybe I'll call it Big Sur. Done. I'm wanting it to be a still splash. May add a few more touches of white. Like good sculpture, it is beautiful from all 360 degrees around it. That was my goal, and I feel like it came to be. Every element of it scrap building materials. It will probably never leave the house. Around here, the criticism would stand a good chance of being something on the order of: Why, he aint done nothin but paint a ol' chunk of cement, heck I could a-done that, and he's askin what for it? (anything above a yard sale price). Honey, if I had a nickel for ever chunk of cement I seen a-layin on the ground, Lord have mercy. Don't artists make nothin pretty no more? This feller needs his head examined if he thinks I'm dumb enough to take somethin like that for art. Whatever y'wanna call it, it belongs in the landfill.  

 

big sur by tj worthington

 

He's had his head examined and found it wanting. Nothing to do but go on ahead with what he's got to do with. By this time in the life, after the first half in absence of self-esteem, I find I have aligned self with who I am, the destination of a lifetime moving in this direction. I owe this viewing to experience in mountain culture, where just about everybody has low self-esteem, raised being told how stupid you are. It is an issue so common in mountain culture that rising above it, finding one's own self-esteem, often through skills, is equally common in the culture. The most outside the box experience in my life was moving to the mountains, committing. No turning around. Get used to it. All I knew about the Blue Ridge was Walker Evans and Doris Ullman photographs of Appalachian poverty. I never found anything like what they portrayed. They were in coal mining regions and other places. They sought the poverty. We have poverty here, though it is largely the older folks, and the young people who can't afford to move someplace else, who want to live their lives close to family, in a trailer with kids, both working dehumanizing minimum wage jobs in poverty, looked down on by everybody driving a new car. Older mountain people living in a brick house with central heat they earned by a lifetime working for the man as electrician, carpenter, factory, often were raised in a little house with half a dozen or more kids, a house that by today's standard is a shack. They didn't know they were poor. They had each other and were rich in the heart. This is how they tell it. Some of the houses continue to stand, homes to young couples who can't afford trailer payments. I'm in a culture of people whose lives are characterized by rising above, without denial. Not so much rising above and away from their people, which many do and go someplace else, as rising above one's own inability to believe in oneself, even to love oneself. The women are better at it than the men, though the men are getting it too. The people around me rise-above inside themselves on a regular basis, as do I. I came to what I took for wilderness for peace of mind to do just that, to rise above my own self-bondage. I'm like the circus elephant raised from a baby tethered to a stake in the ground. It grows up and never questions that it could easily pull the stake out of the ground, having learned in childhood it cannot.  

 

big sur by tj worthington

 

The art form I am working with now, daily writing, I cannot call outside the box in any way. It is basic American prose and I don't want to write "better" than that. Again, after the 20th Century, there isn't much I could invent that hasn't been done multiple times. I can't out-write Rimbaud or Berryman. Even thinking a work of art and forgetting it has been done. Again, the box I see is so vast as to include everything, a sponge like rock music. Rock absorbs every kind of music all the way around the world. In that way, it has become the universal music. Its high energy is the rhythm of our time all around the globe. Pink Floyd could fill the biggest auditorium anywhere, and charging outrageous prices. I write inside the box insofar as I don't write like the Marquis de Sade or Charles Bukowski. The closest to outside the box my writing is, or could ever be, is indifference to seeking a goal through my writing beyond the benefits of journaling. Seeking the benefits of journaling was done by trying it and seeing what benefit, if any, comes through the experience, within. No benefit comes to me from outside except in comment feedback, which I value. Feedback is important in every art form. I don't want ads and I don't want any money involvement. They distract. This thinking was kinda outta the box half a century ago. I like to dive within and search for whatever is at the moment. I like following stream of consciousness James Joyce opened the door to, another box that went poof. I like the flow of stream of consciousness. I like to find a theme and track it, see where it goes, exploring my own associations, self-discovery toward self-knowledge. A wise man from Nazareth said, affirming Socrates, Know thyself. I have lived my adult life with this goal. I've never thought I had lived with goals. That's on the outside. On the inside, this is my goal. Looking for ways to think outside the box is a part of the process too. I have so settled into seeing "the box" extended unto the unknowable unknown it's not a box anymore. Which puts me at the Dada place: everything goes. I do whatever I do on that playing field. I do what I do; it's what I want to do at the moment. Because I see the box infinite, it's the same as no box.

 

big sur by tj worthington

 

 

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DEALING WITH JUDGMENT

ernest trova

Very strange experience today. The day's film was Rust And Bone, a French film by Jacques Audiard, the story of three people. The film amounted to character development of the three and a fairly intense story that uncovered the character of all three. One of the characters was a woman who worked at the French version of Sea World as a trainer with Orcas. She was the target of an Orca attack that took both her legs. She's left to herself to deal with it. At the same time we meet a guy who doesn't pay much attention, has a boy about ten with him, in a French city moving in with the guy's sister and her husband. Things go round and round, he and the Orca trainer start a casual affair with complications. He is an underground mixed martial arts fighter. These are not the ones that fight on tv that play by the rules. A crowd of twenty or thirty men bet on the fighters who go by no rules, no referee. It was brutal in a super-testosterone brain-dead way. She falls in love with he, but he is unable to commit. It goes round and round from there. I don't recall many films where three characters share the lead role. Beautifully made French film using dynamic photography like I've not seen before. All the way through it, the editing and the workings of the camera were new. All three were dealing with real world issues, all of them living without affection and needing it. After much physical, emotional, mental pain, they came together to lean on each other and begin their healing.

 

rene magritte

 

I'm at the end of the film and Justin drove up to the barn to throw some hay bales on the back of his truck to bring to the place I feed the donkeys. I saw him go by, put the movie on hold and threw on jacket, outdoor shoes, hat and gloves, picked up a couple of carrots. I gave carrots to the donkeys and calf over the fence. We stacked the hay bales and covered them with the tarp. Justin came in for a few minutes to smoke a cigarette. I'd mentioned the film I was seeing about the underground fighter. He told me a little bit about the world of underground fighting like that. It's every place. He told me about a fight he had in his wild-thang time with a Mexican over money. The Mexican owed him money and wouldn't give it to him until Justin stuck the barrel of a 9 in his mouth. He told about a guy that had him down with a choke hold and Justin was stuck. He couldn't move and he was losing oxygen starting to fade. The guy put his hand over Justin's mouth and Justin bit a chunk out of the palm of the guy's hand. He let go. He told episode after episode, and I'm sitting here thinking: what's going on? I'm seeing this movie about guys fighting to near death, then Justin comes in telling me of his fights to near death, it's a new moon, and I'm wondering what the hell is happening. All of a sudden I was overwhelmed by stories of the very hardest kind of fighting. It made me ask myself what is going on inside me that needed to hear these stories today. I used to be really put off by such "masculine" behavior. For one thing, it misrepresents the masculine in the same way junkie whores in big cities misrepresent the feminine.  

 

marino marini

 

It caused me to look within. I saw that over my years living in mountain culture, I had to change a great deal of my thinking. Right away I had to get used to men who kill casually, talk about it with excitement the way teenagers talk about rock stars. I have spent my time among my mountain friends controlling my face when they tell me about some of their killing adventures, shooting squirrels and crows for target practice. My friend Jr Maxwell was good with a gun. I think he got a kick out of telling me stories about shooting an owl out of a tree or shooting flocks of crows with a shotgun, just to watch me control my face. Inside, I squirm up into a knot feeling for my friends living happy lives ending up as target practice. All these years later, it still tears me up to hear their kill stories. I've told myself many times it is the culture and if I want to accept the culture as it is, this is the chance to really practice acceptance. It's been a good practice. It has been responsible for much thought, not to justify, but to accept. If I object to these stories, then I inhibit my friends from talking freely around me and I don't want that. I learn to accept. By now I can watch mixed martial arts fighting on tv at Justin's house and enjoy it. First, I know the guys doing it love it. They like getting hurt and they like hurting somebody. It's just how they're wired. I figure they're on their own when they step into the ring, doing what they love doing. I'm not here to deprive them of what they love doing just because I'm squeamish. I can get some appreciation for the sport of what they're doing by acceptance that it's ok for them to do what they want to do, a whole lot better than I can by disapproval. Again, the only thing my disapproval could achieve would be to inhibit my friends from talking freely when I'm around.

 

robert ryman

 

I don't think like them and they know it. They know it better than I do. I accept and appreciate their way of thinking and they allow me mine. Even though they know I'm not a racist and don't kill anything, they feel free in my company. I don't judge them and don't attempt to make them think like I think. I don't want to give any kind of impression that I want them to think like I think. They all know in their hearts that in my heart is no feeling that I am better than any of them in any way. We have totally different experience. I come from another culture and continue to carry much of it with me. I don't object. I like much of both cultures and live with what I take for the best of both. I believe my mountain friends have a certain affection for me because I do not judge them. They don't know anybody that doesn't judge them. I'm remembering how refreshed I felt in the company of the first person I'd ever met I didn't feel was judging me. It was unforgettable. All we did was sit on a screen porch with cups of tea and talk for an hour. It was an unforgettable experience because I felt I could tell or say anything and it would be ok. I can still feel it. Kitty Davy was her name. She was 88 at the time. I knew her for a little over a year, maybe two. She became for me a model of how I wanted to be as a human being, to be a refreshing spirit who simply does not judge. I can't lay claim to that as who I am, but am able somewhat. I want the people in my company uninhibited by perceived judgment. It frees me as much as it frees the other. I'm thinking that today's learning has to do with seeing that I have not "steeled" myself against behavior in others I don't want for myself, but have accepted, allowed, adjusted to their culture such that I am doing all right where understanding is concerned. 

 

robert rauschenberg

 

I'm glad, grateful too, to see I have come into living by non-judgment. I'm thinking the film and Justin today at the same time were measures of how far I have come on my spiritual path. I never dreamed I'd come to a time when I wasn't judging others and self. It just crept up on me. I didn't know that's what was going on. I have become curious to have a glimpse of who it is I'm interacting with conversationally, coffee shop, mancave with friends, hardware store, drugstore, any place, anybody. I've learned to find other people really interesting. There came a time when I tuned in to my own inner spirit and now want to find the inner spirit in the other. I've found that non-judgment soon becomes apparent. Then the other drops judgment and we flow freely without apprehension of being taken for a nerd or thought stupid for having a valid feeling. I'm remembering in Women's Liberation times thinking liberation for women is equally liberation for men. I never understood why other men didn't get it. I was thinking women freeing themselves of stereotypes would free men of stereotypes too. Men of the newer generations are getting it. Please don't misunderstand and suspect I mean I am free of judgment. I am not. I can tell you a lot I'm judgmental about, but the judgment is weaker now. It has no conviction. I don't believe my own judgments. I suppose they drift away because I don't believe them. Friend Jr Maxwell said one evening at the table over drinks, "Don't believe what you think." This from a man I came to assess wise without hesitation. I have a lot of opinions, but don't believe them. I can talk about them, but can't argue about them because I don't believe them. I have zero conviction for any of my opinions. I tend to think of opinions as dots to draw lines between to make sense of the world I live in the best I know how. It's not even a sketchy understanding, but makes a kind of map to give self at least a little bit of an idea of context.

 

robert indiana

 

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STAND BY YOUR FRIENDS

It's amusing that in Thanksgiving cartoons the turkeys are always brown wild turkeys. The turkeys in the oven today were white turkeys raised in huge factories where the turkeys are raised in boxes called buildings, fed by machine, gathered by machine, killed by machine, and made into the bare-skinned blob in the grocery store meat department by machine. Instead of showing wild turkeys in the cartoons, why not use one of the grocery store featherless corpses in the cartoons? This is the only way we know the turkeys. Almost nobody knows what the turkeys go through from birth to death, and don't want to know. Out of sight, out of mind. Don't want to know because it will spoil the Thanksgiving dream. I've heard it said that if you take a tour of a hot dog factory, you'll never eat another hot dog. That can probably be said of all food processing factories. I don't eat canned food much, except in restaurants, because they are so laden with salt, such that I'm eating spinach-, bean- or corn-flavored salt. I don't like to be too particular about such details in food. To be so particular, I'd have to move to a city that has a big farmer's market, live nearby and consume only fresh vegetables. I don't want to live in a city and don't want to get that involved in cooking. Cooking is not my art form. I eat whatever is before me. I figure people have lived on meat from the beginning of humanity. We've survived it thus far. I'm not going to edit what I eat by reading the ingredients list of unpronounceable words starting with xyz that tell me the product is lethal. I take it for granted and take it for the nature of the world I live in. Don't like it, must accept it.   

 

 

Finally, by noon today, the temperature had risen to about 35 degrees from 14 degrees it went down to in the night. The donkeys and the calves are lying down, full sides to the sun, thawing out their bones. It may take all day. The day's full sunlight must feel good to them after last night's bitter cold--it had wind in it, too, wind full of air dragons. Down here in my little valley between ridges, air dragons seldom fly through. Late in the day I went to a neighbor's house across the road and on the ridge where the wind blows freely. I was in the kitchen area and heard the sound of the glass storm door like somebody had opened and closed it. I looked. Nobody there. The corner of the house creaked at the same time. I realized it was an air dragon. I heard several roar through while I was there. The air dragons seem to like it up on top of the ridge where they can fly eel-like through the barren trees, then *BAM* into the side of a house. I visualize the air dragons something like what we call dust devils. In the summer on a dry dirt road, occasionally the wind will whip up a miniature tornado that goes spinning along the road surface a ways, and it's gone. I'm seeing air dragons spontaneously stirred up, swirling through the air maybe a few hundred feet, then flying apart. Or flying into the side of a house like a bird flies into a window.

The temperature has been so bitter cold that outdoors is good where it is. I was glad for the donkeys the meadow beside the house breaks the wind for them when it comes in from the west like it did the last few days and nights. I'm glad they had a good day of sun with temperature above freezing to dry out from the rain before the temperature drop. Marsha told me not to be concerned about them keeping warm. Marsha is my contact for horse nature. Wednesday morning I went into Farmer's Hardware for a Christmas present and some turpentine. Sat with Marsha in the back of the store with the coffee pot and we talked about horses and donkeys for an hour or more. Marsha is also my contact now with the old-time mountain culture that is going away with the wind. These were our subjects we could have gone on all day talking about. I enjoy conversation with Marsha. She knows these mountains and the mountain ways as somebody who has paid attention with appreciation, seeing it slip away in sorrow, We talked much of our own particular appreciations of these mountains and old way of life. It is hard for both of us to see a society that once was truly classless be swept aside by the country clubs and middle class people moving in here, making the mountain people the working class, the people on the wrong side of the tracks. The same happened to the Tibetans when China took over Tibet and moved people from overcrowded cities in eastern China to Tibet where they outnumbered the Tibetans that stayed behind instead of leaving for refugee camps in India. The Tibetans in their own land are the lower class out of sight, like the American Indian, like the Australian Aborigine. And now the mountain people are becoming outcasts in their own homeland.

I don't believe I'll ever get over seeing my friend Harold Hayes disrespected, talked to like a dog by an urban Florida woman who thinks living here is such a good place to raise the kids. I've fallen into the weave of life in a community where you have to be careful who you talk about, because it might be somebody's cousin or sister or aunt or grandson. In the mountain way, I don't like seeing my friends disrespected. I take it the same as it happening to me. Harold and I have a special bond. He was one of my friend Jr Maxwell's closer friends. He played bass in Jr's bluegrass band, The Green Mountain Boys, for several years. Harold appreciated that I took care of his friend Jr in his last year unto his dying. Our handshakes are the same as a hug. Harold is in his 80s and does not understand political correctness. Doesn't even know what it is. He has some nutty ideas about political subjects that everybody knowing him accepts as "that's Harold." The people I know who know Harold have a deep affection for him. He's a good example of what I call a good man. All the way around. Wherever I am when I see Harold, I stop and visit with him. He speaks to me by a different name every time I see him. He can never remember a name, so he makes one up and that's your name for now. Then you get people who are insulted because he can't remember their name. I always plead his case. I suppose, to put it simply, Harold is someone who cares about the people he knows. And the people he knows care about him. I'm one of the people who cares about Harold. To see him disrespected is hard for me.

I'm of the attitude that where my friends are not welcome, I am not welcome. It takes me back to the day I came up with my maxim for living in the mountains: Anybody too good for a Pruitt is too good for me. A Pruitt, here, can be anybody of these mountains, anybody not considered on the social ladder. It has served me well using this rule of thumb to identify people to stay away from. My maxim applies to mountain people generally. I've been told a few times I'm wasting my time with people of no consequence. It only makes me laugh and think: there's nothing psychic about you. I've been told it would be to my benefit to pay more attention to the exurbanites moving into the mountains. Again: not very psychic, are you? It amazes me when somebody who doesn't know you at all starts telling you what's best for you, what's right for you, A Rolling Stone lyric comes to mind, "I'm giving you a piece of my mind, there's no charge of any kind." What do you say?, Yeah, thanks--What do I owe you? The way accent crept into my voice after years of living among people of a certain accent, various aspects of the culture have rubbed off on me. One aspect is standing by your friends. It runs all over me to see someone I regard a friend disrespected, someone I respect about the highest. I have a hard time respecting somebody who disregards Harold for not knowing the new people require political correctness in your language, just like in church. I can't help but think anybody too good for Harold is too good for me. My friends are my friends for multiple good reasons.

 

 

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THE SOUTH OF MY HEART

thomas hart benton

Been thinking today of how much I love the South. Remembering my trip to Kansas about 10 years ago, a Yankee state, what a slap-down I got every time I mentioned the South, especially mentioning loving the South. Nobody ever let that pass. They, who had never been in the South, knew more about it than I did after living in the South my entire adult life. Almost every time I talk with somebody from outside the South about the South, they know everything about it and I know nothing. This is part of what makes Yankees who come to the South objectionable. They know all there is to know about the South. The Civil War is over, when you Southerners gonna get it? First time somebody said that to me, I explained that the Civil War is not over. Didn't bother any more after that. It's like telling Baptists that Catholics have a home in heaven too. Telling is not what I'm about. I don't believe in telling other people what's the right way to think or believe. I'm recalling a good friend of many years, a Southerner living in Brooklyn, who told me it is my responsibility to convert a friend of mine here in the mountains away from racism. I said it is not my responsibility. I was reminded it is my responsibility. I didn't take it beyond that. It would devolve into is-isn't-is-isn't very shortly. I've thought about it many times since then. It is not my responsibility to tell a Southern boy it is necessary for him to think like he's a Yankee. You want to see a back go up like a Halloween cat in somebody's eyes, tell a Southern boy he needs to think and talk more like a Yankee.

thomas hart benton

What I have learned in my few forays beyond the Mason Dixon Line is Yankees dislike Southerners a whole lot more than Southerners dislike Yankees. The only problem a Southerner has with a Yankee is a Yankee can't stop telling Southern people what to do. They feel so superior it comes across in tone of voice, attitude, everything. That's experiential learning. I've come to where I shy away from Yankees because they can't get enough of telling us ignernt Southerners what to do, how to think and talk. Us ignernt Southerners hear it and laugh inside. In the South, we're polite when we want to be, so we don't laugh in their faces. Many a Yankee has heard (in a Southern accent), "If you don't like it here, the road that brought you will take you right back to where it's better. Nobody asked you to come here and nobody is going to miss you when you're gone." Many a Yankee has returned up North after retiring to the South. It's them Suthun ways that don't pay no attention when a Yankee tells them how to do it better. We just leave them alone. After awhile of telling everybody that lives around them what they're doing wrong, the people around them stop noticing them. Everybody leaves them to their superior selves. And many a Yankee has been warmly embraced by Southerners, the ones without a superior attitude. Egoism does not appeal to Southerners, esp in other Southerners. It's expected from Yankees.

thomas hart benton



I confess to not understanding a lot of Southern ways, like racism, which is not as pervasive as the television and Hollywood make it. They just point the finger at the worst of it. It's here. So what is how I feel about it. There is slave trade going on in NYC and LA today. It's underground and largely Asian, so who cares? I'm not here to change anything but myself. I'm not here to teach. I'm here to learn. Most of my closer friends are "liberals." The South is loaded with liberals. We just don't make a lot of noise about it, because, for one thing, we're outnumbered by people driving pickups with guns under the seats. We're diplomatic in the mountains. I've had good friends to the point of bonding with very different political beliefs from mine. For one thing, I'm really not dedicated to my own points of view, because I can't take politics that seriously. I have a point of view, but that's all it is. When I start feeling agitated I pull back. In the old way, among the mountain people that are gone into the past, people accepted that every individual had his own views and beliefs about things. They didn't step on each other's toes or provoke each other. Mountain people are very diplomatic. In the culture, all men carried guns for a couple centuries--a gun is either with them or they can get their hands on one in a hurry. One man did not provoke another man unless he wanted a fight. By fists or guns, a mountain boy can put you on your ass and make you think twice about going back for more. A mountain man that fights has powerful arms. It's that way with mountain people all over the world.

thomas hart benton

Democrats and republicans could sit around the wood stove in the country store and talk freely. They just didn't talk about politics. They didn't talk about religion either. Each man and woman has their own. That was respected. It's not respected anymore. Now is about conforming to a checklist, guidelines, no expressions of individualism allowed. It's another social change. I understand that in a lot of ways the South undermines itself by being dead set against unions. Ever thought about it? The Union is what the Confederacy went down fighting. Union means Yankee rule in the South. Unacceptable as saying fuck in Sunday school class. We'd rather be poor than Union-ized. I'm not in the South to make the South what it is not. I came to the South because I loved the South from afar and needed to be connected with it. I was born to Southern people living in a Yankee state. I had to get to the South as fast as I could get after high school. I had the draft to deal with, so I let the Navy take me to the South, Charleston. Two years on a destroyer (that was sold to the Brazilian navy soon after I left it) with a crew of Southerners was educational. I learned the best and the worst in my crash-course introduction to the South.

thomas hart benton

Next stop, the College of Charleston, where everybody was Southern. And I loved it. It was another country. I was able to see the last years of the Old South, the decayed old city that had been in Depression since the Civil War. In my last year at the College the New South came to Charleston. There was an interesting book in that time about the Los Angeles-ization of the South. It seemed far fetched then. By now, it is long established. I see I have spent my adult life running back in time to the time before the post-Fifties social changes. I don't mean civil rights. I mean rat race. When the changes brought by the New South came in, I went to the mountains to recede from the advancing social changes. By now, they have caught up with me. I have one foot in the old world and one foot in the modern world. That's how it is in my mind, in my heart, and in the people I know. About half the people I'm close to are hillbillies and about half are from Away, even a few Yankees, ones who did not come to the South with an attitude. People who are here because they love it. In my life in the South I have come to love it like it's my mother. I feel embraced in love by the South. It's the return of my love for the South, the South loving me for loving the Southern people and the Southern ways. About twenty years ago I was standing in a line in the Boston airport between planes. Talking with a man in front of me in the line I said, This is the farthest north I've ever been. He said, I know.

thomas hart benton

 

 

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