TRUST

Hokusai

Rode again today by public transportation to Winston-Salem, so grateful somebody else was driving, I'd have been happy if the van's interior smelled of beer and puke, which, thankfully, it did not. It had a pleasant aroma, almost a new car scent. It tells the degree the drivers keep the vans immaculately clean. It also tells on management. The service is that well managed. I see it in the people working there, their efficiency and communication. The drivers of the recent four trips have been good people, good drivers, friendly people I felt I knew as a friend by the time we returned. I used to be uncomfortable alone with somebody I did not know for an extended time.  Possibly, in that time the ego was in a turmoil wanting to make a good impression, not say the wrong thing. That was awhile ago. Since then, much has changed. I think it had something to do with accepting self as is, not as I might want self to appear. Maybe it had something to do with fear of others, fear of judgment, growing up in a hyper-judgmental environment. Maybe I'm getting close to home.

 

hokusai

 

Living in the mountains went a long ways toward healing that affliction. I live in a world of people I care about who care about me. It's what I call community. It took living among the mountain people, people I fell in love with as a people, as a culture, individuals in the culture. Some of the most human human beings I've known have been here in these hills. I emphasize the human as allowing their own humanity, the full range of it. Judged from the outside by Yankees, the hill people don't have much to offer. Seen from the inside, from inside the culture, from knowing the lives of the people around me, I see people who exemplify what I consider the highest human qualities in their everyday lives. You have to know the people well to see what they have to offer. They don't brag on themselves, they don't put themselves first. First thing that comes to mind I can say of the mountain people is grace. They have a grace that can only be seen from the inside. It is closed to the outside. I find I breathe the freest in the company of mountain people. I feel most comfortable with the mountain people I know, the wide variety of them, given that each one is individual who he or she is. Getting acquainted with somebody new from here is fun, find out who they're related to, who they know that I know, where they grew up, went to church. By the time our first conversation is over, we know each other.

hokusai

 

I don't mean to imply they are perfect people with halos. They are human beings who live in a world of other human beings. Inside the culture, everyone is treated with respect and regards others around them with respect. Trust is especially important among the people of these hills. Trust is important to me. I learned it here. It took thirty-five years for Whitehead community to trust me, and I'm glad it took so long. The trust would be empty otherwise. I never learned much about trust in youth, living in a world where  fickle was the norm. Perhaps this could be behind why trust is so important in the latter half of the life. It has a great deal to do with why I value certain people that other people look askance at. I see someone who understands trust, someone I know I could trust to the grave. For having such trust given to me, I feel it necessary to give such trust in turn. The people with trust between them never talk about the other behind their back. It's an unspoken code. Personally, this trust that takes years to earn gives life a richness like the rich quality of a chocolate cake.

 

Hokusai

 

I like to hear people tell their stories, like on the radio show, This American Life, though in person, hearing it from the source. Sometimes, like today, I talk just to keep the other talking, because I like hearing their stories so much. They tell me who they are in their stories and I tell who I am in my stories. On the drive to Winston-Salem and back, we carried on a spontaneous back-and-forth story-telling festival of experiences, people we've known. I've learned from experience to avoid politics and religion as subjects for conversation. Too predictable, both based in ill-informed opinions. I'd rather talk about our lives, what we've observed. In the Age of hate radio and television, I know better than to let a man my age, more or less, get going on politics. The white men of my generation have been a disappointment, now that we're the old people. When I was younger, I thought the older people the most interesting. Now that I'm older, I see the younger people the most interesting. I like to watch kids play. The spontaneous appeals to me now more than ever.

Hokusai

self-portrait 1839

 

 

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MY FRIEND HAROLD HAYES

john singer sargent

 

My old buddy, Harold Hayes, continues in my mind after hearing him mocked for his failure at political correctness. The old boy is of a generation that doesn't even know what it is. His mind has been gone for at least ten years. He still has enough mind to drive his pickup and go to town every once in awhile to get out of the house and see some people. He's very difficult to talk with. Talking to him, he misses almost everything. When he talks, it's the same thing every time I see him. This does not bother me, I've known Harold a long time, since before his mind went away. Several times in the coffee shop, Harold has come in for a cup of coffee and to see if anyone was in there he could talk to. His head wobbles and his eyes are kind of far away, but Harold is there. Mind out of control, about all that is left is the fine human being that he is all the way to the soul. He was always welcome in the time Selma had the shop. It was in Selma's time I would see him in there. He always embarrasses me when I see him, wherever it is, Farmer's Hardware, any of the places he drops by to visit. He feels compelled to tell everyone in the place, calling their attention, to tell them what a great friend I am. He wants to tell that I took care of his closest friend in his life, Jr Maxwell, in his dying. He stumbles around with words and few know what he's talking about but me.

 

john singer sargent

 

Harold used to be a bluegrass bass player, and a guitar player. I say "used to" because he sold his bass. No point keeping it when he couldn't play it any more. For much of his adult life he made music every weekend for dances. He played bass with Jr Maxwell's band, The Green Mountain Boys, with fiddlers Art Wooten, Johnny Miller, Ernest Johnson, and some others. He learned the bass from Jr's wife, Lois, who was the band's bass player, and took her place. She taught Harold in order for him to take her place. He and Jr were probably each other's closest friends throughout the rest of their lives. In my time of taking care of Jr, which lasted about six months intensive, and a year of looking in on him twice a day and spending time with him. He was lonesome and simply needed some company. His home with nobody else in it was a void for him. Lois died of cancer, and his wife after Lois was a woman from Away who took him for having money, a farm, and left him when he didn't die soon enough. To take Jr for having money, her sights were not set very high. She ran through everything he had in twelve years and left him when he had nothing left and in debt to a degree he'd never been in his life. Then she left him and tried to take his house and his business, which, fortunately, the judge saw through. Everybody in the county abandoned her and she had to leave the county. Nobody would have to do with her. She'd speak to people she knew before, and they'd look away.

 

john singer sargent

 

Jr Maxwell was one of the better respected men in the county. Not that the people who call themselves society had anything to do with him. The people of the county, outside a closed circle of climbers in Sparta, all respected Jr for legitimate reasons, for his character. Outside Sparta, the people of the county have their own culture that interacts not at all with Sparta, but for hardware stores, groceries, gas and bank. In the world of the people of the county, everyone of his generation knew each other. Among the mountain people, they know each other for who they are, not their assets or stylish appearance. Among the mountain people, humility is regarded a virtue. Among the white suburbanites coming into the mountains and taking over, arrogance is a virtue, humility regarded stupid. Mountain people do not take to arrogance in any form or from anybody, and do not tolerate it among their own. I have a bad case of it too. Somebody comes at me from an arrogant place, I absent myself. I've found the best way to get rid of them is to drop some hillbilly grammar. The one I like best is saying them for those. Once is all it takes. They look at me askance and they're gone. I don't even have to go for a walk. Every year, Jr Maxwell would take a day and go around with his tractor to plow the gardens for the widows of Whitehead and the old people past able to do for themselves. Every snow, he took his tractor and blade around to the people of Whitehead who could not do for themselves and scraped their driveways. When Jr became unable, himself, somebody cleared his driveway.

 

john singer sargent

 

Harold Hayes was one of Jr's friends who dropped in on him periodically, sat and talked with him awhile about whatever they talked about. It wasn't a matter of what they talked as much as that they talked. Jr was Harold's closest friend. He looked up to Jr actually as if on a pedestal, regarded that well. I knew Harold before the time of Jr's inability to take care of himself. Every time he visited Jr in the time I was staying there, he made it a point to be sure I understood how much he appreciated what I was doing for Jr. A deep love ran between them, the love between friends of many years. All of Jr's friends became my friends in that time. The day his spirit left the body, one said to me, "Now Whitehead knows who you are," and another, "You get into any kind of trouble, all of Whitehead will back you up." Those were the most valuable sentences ever spoken to me in my life. I value those sentences, the people of Whitehead, the ones who said them in the core of my heart. Harold Hayes would embarrass me when he came into the coffee shop with all the praise from his heart that I'd helped his friend. It never ended when it started. His mind was gone, though his heart wide awake. I am Harold's connection with Jr now that he's gone. And likewise, when I see Harold, I see Jr. We have a bond we both value. My face automatically lights up in a big smile when I see Harold. I don't take kindly to my friend being dismissed by the people who value arrogance. It reminds me why I love the mountain people so deeply.

 

john singer sargent himself

 

 

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THE BLACK BOX

richard tuttle

Something is happening in the heavens this week. I am lit in creative inspiration manifesting in all kinds of ways. The part that has me most lit is painting a box black today. I drove to town to buy some black paint at Chris Davis's shop, loving the black it makes and the way it smooths brush strokes. It is paint for furniture. I needed a paint that would finish smooth without spraying it. The box, itself, is the work of art and I want the paint smooth. A flat black not too flat, an imperceptible bluish haze in the black. Just enough to take the dead out of the black. Black is a very sensitive color to work with. I prefer to make my blacks mixing alizarin crimson and thalo green. They make a vibrant black that comes to life. Black out of a tube is dead by comparison. The box I've had probably twenty years, one of those things picked up along the way --- I can do something with this --- that clutter the house and I can't get rid of it, it has such potential. I brought it out of its corner and propped it up on the leg of the table that holds the home entertainment units, to see it all the time. It is the place I put things I want to do something with. Look at it, get acquainted with its shape and imagine possibilities. The cedar board I glued the cardboard pyramids on leaned against a bookshelf for a year. This box has been out a few weeks. I swept cobwebs out of it and kept it in my mind's eye. It is a couple feet long and ten inches wide, two inches deep. 

richard tuttle

The box had a door, a wood frame and plexiglas. It was made to display something to do with pipes in the carpentry department at the old Dr Grabow pipe factory in Sparta. A friend was working there when they closed down and threw everything out. He brought several boxes and boards home. He gave me several of the boxes. I've used three of them before, that I can think of, in art projects. This box has been a puzzle. I was looking for something to put inside it, make a kind of 3-D abstract environment. It never seemed right. Nothing that came satisfied what I was looking for. Didn't know what it was, but knew I'd know it when I see it. Reminded myself, simple, repeatedly while looking for possibilities. A few days ago I saw I could take the door off. It would make a frame with the plexiglas I could use for something else. The box by itself was beautiful. Nicely made, simply made. The wood is soft, easy to sand. My friend Crystal has been buying old frames, cutting a piece of quarter inch plywood to fit inside the frame. She makes the frames beautiful with an antiquing process she uses and paints the board black with paint to draw on with chalk. She sells them to hang in the kitchen to chalk notes on. They're beautiful. I saw in her shop several of them leaning against the wall. I said, "You painting abstractions in black?" She explained their purpose. I was stunned by the beauty of a rectangle of black in a beautiful frame. I felt like I was seeing a show of black paintings.

richard tuttle

It stayed with me. A few weeks ago, possibly around the same day, I was writing about wanting my art to be simple as a line of string. From that moment on, I saw doing something with a piece of string in the front of my mind almost continually. I saw the box painted black, all of it. The sides of the box make a frame. The plywood bottom, now the back, it will hang vertically on a wall, is a black abstraction in a black frame. I put an eye-screw on the top, the underside of the frame about midway. Painted it black with the whole box today as soon as I arrived home from town. The eyescrew will suspend a line of string three feet long. It will hang straight down the middle of the black and the extra foot of string will rest on the inside of the bottom part of the frame, a two-inch shelf. Whatever shape the string takes in its squiggles is ok. It's ok even if it hangs over the edge. The string will hang down the middle, an inch from the back, and curve at the bottom making the squiggle. Thought about leaving the eye-screw silver, liking utilities to show, but it would distract. I wanted the white line to be it. To almost everyone who sees it, the string will be the subject, a piece of string. For my eye, the whole thing is the subject, the frame, the back and the string. The string is, nonetheless, the subject. It is the visualization of my will to find art expression simple as a line of string. There it is. The black amounts to a presentation of the white line. It is taking the most common, like cardboard, displaying its beauty against a surface that enhances its beauty. It's saying a string is a beautiful object seen separate from its utilitarian role that makes it too common to notice. 

richard tuttle

It is a way of saying an individual is a beautiful thing looked at with compassion as art. I have found living among American hillbillies, people looked down upon from everywhere in the country as too common for notice, people who live their lives true human beings. Working class people. Stay away from them. The gum chewers. They've not been to college, so they can't know anything. Mountain people are at about the bottom rung of status among white people. And mountain people don't care. They like being dismissed. The exurbanites look past them and don't see them, and that's just how the mountain people like it. When it gets down to the nitty-gritty of a collapsed economy, the mountain people know who the exurbanites will be turning to calling for help, because they don't know how to do anything. Can't work a chainsaw. Thirty-eight years of living among the most common people, from the point of view of flatlanders, I've seen deeply enough inside the culture and the people to know that of all the varieties of people I've known throughout my life, it is the mountain people I am glad I live among. It's something you have to be on the inside to see. It's a matter of living by the heart. Outsiders see it as emotion, but from the inside it is heart. I'm saying with the string that common has art in it too. If I were to be a novelist or playwright, I'd write about mountain people and put them in relation to the invasion of the flatlanders as a contrast to bring out their beauty, like the black pushes the white line of the string forward and says, behold beauty. I'll wait til morning to attach the string. The paint dries fast, though I want it to dry overnight before I handle it. I've spent the whole evening practicing waiting. 

richard tuttle

*

MY FLOW IS SLOW

peter halley

I'm needing a break from watching tv sports every weekend. I do not care anything about any of it. I get together with friends to watch the race, football, basketball, baseball, golf and commercials, hundreds of commercials. It's wearing me out. The last few weeks I sat with head in hands asking, what I'm doing to myself? Why? The why is to see friends who work all week and this is our only chance to get together. Still, I need a break, a weekend or two without television. Justin wanted me to go to Daytona with him, ten hours one way, a few hundred dollars, to see the race when race season starts. No. Why not? You need to ask? I can't ride on interstate for twenty hours, eat at Waffle Houses, stay in a cheap (expensive) motel, and listen to heavy metal satellite radio for twenty hours. Three days of not feeding the donkeys, not feeding Caterpillar, not writing and not having any solitary time. Not my trip. I've been to a race. One was enough. It's a great experience, but I don't need multiples. The race is better on tv. It's best when I stay at home and don't see it at all. I'm worn out by the repetition. I'm happy with the human company, but gaping at Propaganda Central becomes ridiculous, watching men in suits chatter so hysterically it sounds like they're sinking in quicksand, talking fast as their jaws can flap to get it all said before going under. They talk like at a cocktail party, as fast as possible, saying nothing in a continuous string of words spoken like people talk on commercials, attempting frantically to convince me to buy something I care nothing about. All tv sports are better on mute. They're boring silent too. How many times do I have to be astounded that somebody caught a ball somebody else threw? I look at the crowd and imagine the horror of a massive parking lot, thousands of people I don't know spending big money on buckets of sugar drinks, bags and boxes of hyper-salted snacks. incredibly expensive tickets to get in. I look around at the people, who are largely working class, and think, Where did you get all this money? Credit card. 

peter halley

Saturday, I started the day off believing I had the whole day at home, Sunday the day we get together to watch the games. I was relaxed into the day when the phone rang around noon saying the games they wanted to watch were playing Saturday. My spirit dropped to the floor like a chalk outline around a dead body that's been removed. Saturday gone. I'll have Sunday to myself, to sleep off Saturday. I like being with Justin, Melvin, Crystal, Vada and Cheyanne. They're the people I feel at home with. The repetition for so many years is wearing me out. It's time to take a break of a weekend or two. I like to go to a Primitive Baptist church meeting sometimes, but had to stop. I like to drop in when I feel like it, hear some good singing and good preaching. I've done it enough that I became familiar, expected to attend more regularly. Can't do that. Too Patriarchal. I'm not getting mixed up with a bunch of men of adamantine minds who watch False News and listen to Rush Limbaugh during the week. I do not willfully put myself into that kind of company where I'm expected to interact. When they find out I'm a liberal, I'm out anyway. So why start something I know in advance will come to a dead end? I believe I will take next weekend off, stay home, look out the window at the birds and the donkeys, read, write and advance an art project. I drank some coffee late to keep my head from nodding off. If I didn't have to drive, I'd have got drunk. I wanted to put on a cd of some hard core punk and have a good jam. We'd go to the mancave before half time and stay there listening to the game on the radio. When they went back upstairs, I stayed in the mancave long enough to recharge my interior battery in temporary solitude, to visualize art projects, to remind self to be here now, stop feeling like I'm wasting time I could be writing, reading, and having a nap. It's the repetition that's wearing me down. 

peter halley

Driving up the mountain, I was planning my dive onto the bed. Walk in the door, empty my pockets, take off coat and shoes, fall onto the bed and be still. I walked in the door around 12:30 and woke up. Opened the laptop and brought up the blank page. I started writing like horses held back by the starting gate, charging forward when the gates opened. I felt like I'd been under water and came up for air. I thought I'd write a few hours, now that I'm wide awake. Got a flow going, heated some water, made a cup of Twining's Chai tea. I felt like I'd been held back for eight hours from doing the only thing I wanted to do, write to you. Like a rubber band pulled back, I sailed into the writing groove right away. The one cup of tea kept me going all night. I like writing in the night best of all. It's a time of psychic peace with most of the people in the time zone sleeping. It's the time of dreams. By 5:30, I was wound up, awake, ready to start something else. It was like I'd slept all day til midnight and lived my day in the night. When I say it held me back like backing up water into a lake, I don't mean it held me back with regret. Not at all. It was my social time in the week with friends. Switching Sunday to Saturday made me a bit wobbly on my track. It must be one of many infirmities that go with a certain age. I map out the day in the morning, not in detail, but whether or not I have to go to town that day, whether or not I have an appointment that day. Saturday morning, I saw a day of staying at home, a long nap, Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors arrived in the morning's mail. Had not seen it in too many years, had been thinking about it, so I ran it to the top of my queue a few days ago. It is my favorite of his films and among my top favorite films. I was looking forward to sitting back with Caterpillar on my lap to enjoy a film I know in advance I love. I'm fluid enough that I can easily wait until Sunday to see the film. I was ready to see it and, *poof,* it went away. Only slightly disorienting, but disorienting nonetheless. 

peter halley

I don't think it's age that makes it disorienting. I've slowed down so appreciably that I've found my flow. I've been able to slow down to my flow's speed by separating self from the higher speed flow of money making. Thank you, FDR, for Social Security. I am able to live at the rate of my own flow, supine in my canoe. Talking with my friend Carole this morning, I spoke of how this place I'd never heard of, knew no more about than I knew about the mountains of southern France, became my home for the second half of my life. She is of the same experience in her own way. I came to a blank slate. She did too. Our experiences getting here were entirely different, and experiences living here are entirely different, as well. There was never a premonition nor desire to live on a back road in the Blue Ridge. It was never even a thought. My parachute landed me here where God flung me like a seed. I now recall a prayer about a year before arriving in the mountains, when I learned to satisfaction that God is, to put me in a very different culture where English is spoken. I took mountain culture to be the answer to my prayer. I regarded everyone I from the first days as gifts from God. I still see the mountain people gifts from God. There have been days I did not, but those times come and go. And it's not a love-hate relationship. I love the mountain people. Some I like better than others, but that goes with living in this world. I'm grateful every day that I found my Walden Pond, the Donkey Meadow. It has been very difficult along the way in many ways. At the same time, it has been joyous. The people of the mountains taught me how to know people. The people of the mountains taught me so much, and continue to that I can't even think about corralling it and saying this is it. What I've learned has become who I am. In the second year here a guy from Raleigh told me it's good I came to the mountains with education, I can teach civilization to the ignorant mountain people. I'd already lived here a year and knew his assessment to be the ignorant part. I said, "I didn't come here to teach. I came here to learn." The old Air Bellows school house has been my home since day one.     

peter halley himself

*

             

HILLBILLY HEAVEN

 

caterpillar lioness

 

I want to sit back with a movie and Caterpillar on my lap, but I want to do this more. Been waiting all day to be here. Didn't get to write yesterday from weariness after being up all night writing about the Wild Goose experience, which I felt was valuable, not just for the spiritual fellowship of the meeting, but the entire experience with Debi, who is valuable to my heart. She's a catbird in kitten britches. True as true is and she don't back down from nothin. A few years ago she was driving in Sparta, just left the traffic light in front of the courthouse. A man was walking across the street in front of her and he turned and made some smart remark to her about not slowing down soon enough. She laid a revolver on her arm resting on the open window and asked him to repeat what he said. He ran. Her life has been a struggle, the cause of the struggle being the men in her life. She's been into everything that could be got into, multiple times. Her heart embraces all the world around her. Such a big heart she doesn't know how to handle it, it gets trampled and beat down. She has something of a contentious personality, too, which is simply mountain. It gets her in trouble sometimes. She doesn't care. She'd say, I am who I am and I aint bein nothin else for nobody. You hear a lot of triple negatives in the mountains. I love it every time I hear one. Once I heard a quadruple negative. It's still in my head, heard it between 25 and 30 years ago. It was so beautiful I memorized it, can't find it right now, but it will rise to the surface in a day or two. The woman who said it was Eura Lee Phipps, wife of John Lee Phipps. Some people called them the Lees. Eura Lee sang in the Regular Baptist church, so fine a hillbilly voice it brings tears to remember it. One of the men would lead, most often Millard, the preacher, Debi's great uncle, who sang with the soul of Ralph Stanley. When he sang a gospel song, you felt its meaning. He and Eura Lee would lead the songs. He'd sing a line and she'd repeat it in her high hillbilly voice, all the way through. She'd sing a phrase after a phrase, sometimes a word after a word. Fourteen years I listened to Eura Lee's beautiful singing that was totally unselfconscious. She just sang the songs the way she sang them since she was little.
 

air bellows outdoor art museum

 

This is getting close to my heart right about now. People from the past I have loved in community and individually, the people of my heart. So many of them dead now. The very last of the old-time mountain people are dead. May be a few left in the nursing homes. A few are in their nineties, but their minds are largely gone. I had the great good fortune to know some of the most wonderful people of my life in these mountains. In my Charleston years I knew a lot of good people, but here in these mountains is where I found the home of my soul. Today at the doctor's office talking with the nurse taking blood pressure, whose husband is a bluegrass musician, and she's from Fries (pron: freeze), Virginia, we were talking about what fun it would be to go to sleep one night and wake up in Gloryland. I asked if she knew the Ralph Stanley song, Gloryland, knowing she did, and she did. We both had a moment of inner swoon hearing Ralph Stanley. Another version of Gloryland, by the Marshall Family. They own that song. It is totally theirs. I'm going to check YouTube, I already know it's there. It's in a cd in another room, but I don't want to go look for it. Found it on YouTube and now the whole front of my face is wet all the way down the chin. Just now wiped a tear off my chin. Wow. If you want to hear what I mean by hillbilly singing, the Marshall Family do it. They're from the mountains of central Pennsylvania and they do mountan singing right. That song tears me up. The visual with it was big clouds in natural cloud motion. My eyes were closed all the way through and tears of joy running. Hadn't heard that song in some years. There'll be no tears in Gloryland, the moon and sun won't shine, for Christ himself is light up there. There'll be no graves on that bright shore. It's of the Baptist tradition in the spirit of a church hymn. I think it was originally a black gospel song. It has that kind of soul. Ralph Stanley sang it too, and it don't get no better'n Ralph Stanley singin a gospel song.

home sweet home

Went to YouTube again and found Judy Marshall singing I Just Want To Thank You Lord, another Marshall Family song that tears me up. Simple song, soulful. When I was so down and out, you came along and made me want to shout. I just want to thank you, Lord, for always being there. Wow. I'm in the spirit. Eyes are running. Those are the two songs by the Marshall Family that I love with my whole heart, just like I love Caterpillar. It's taking me back to my Saturday morning radio show on local AM station WCOK. Seven years of playing music of the Central Blue Ridge an hour every Saturday. It was my favorite hour of the week, because I was playing what I called Music From Home, emphasis on musicians of this and surrounding counties, to the people of my county. It included gospel. Mountain people love their gospel music. And it's something to love. Emphasis was the Central Blue Ridge, and it included down into Georgia mountains with the Skillet Lickers, the Smokies and up into West Virginia and East Kentucky and  East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, Northwest NC. All hillbilly music. I gave my listeners some good jams. When I played the Carter Family, I couldn't talk for choking up. Just the mention of one of their names, all I had to do was say, "Sara," or "AP," or "Maybelle," and I'd choke up unable to talk. Long silences, not good on the air. None of their songs needed introduction or anything said. When I played an hour of Carter Family there was no talk, because I couldn't talk. I wept through the whole show from knowing how much my listeners were loving the music. The people of these hills LOVE the Carter Family. Playing the Stanley Brothers, I couldn't talk, and often playing Ralph Stanley. These were musicians I loved so much and knew all my listeners loved them even more than I did. I was saying to my listeners what I say to the mountain people in all my art forms: Your culture is valid and good. You are valid and good. When I write articles for the old-time music magazine, I am doing the same thing: your music is valid and good, you are valid and good. For five years I wrote a column in the local weekly paper. I wrote to the mountain people I live among and appreciate as much as I'm able to appreciate anything. My attitude was that I was writing specifically to the mountain people of this county. All others had permission to read if they wanted to.

stay away from important people

 

Writing that column was tremendous fun. When I wrote about somebody, it was always country people like I like being among, never any of the "important" people. My attitude was they get enough press. They don't need my attention too. Anyway, they're sure as hell not going to get it. I had the attitude before Jr Maxwell gave me the maxim, Stay away from important people. One night an elderly woman who believed herself Sparta Society, which I took for an oxymoron, she called me at home to tell me I needed to write more about the important people and less about these people who are nobodies. The next piece I wrote celebrated the janitor at the courthouse, told about his life, introduced him to the community, told about who he was, a friend of mine, humble old hillbilly, told the work he does. I concluded that the courthouse is the most important building in the county and Roy maintains that building, making him one of the more important men in the county. Roy couldn't read. One of the women in the Clerk of Court office read it to him with all of them standing around listening. Judges were talking to him after reading it and the lawyers spoke to him as if he were a man. The people around him celebrated him. Every day for a month afterward somebody would mention to him having seen it. It brought him a month of very positive attention and even gratitude for all that was taken for granted. The coffee pots in the break room always had fresh coffee in them. When they were low, suddenly they were full again. A few years later he didn't show up for work one morning. A deputy went to the house and found him in the bed, gone to Gloryland. The county had a plaque made in his memory for his service that hangs on the wall in the courthouse hallway. Somebody so unappreciated he was invisible. My work kept me in the courthouse every day for six years. I came to know Roy pretty well. The day any graffiti appeared on the men's or the women's rooms walls, it was gone same day. He kept the walls painted white, so all he had to do was go over it one time with the brush. Roy was a good man. I was grateful to that old woman for inspiring me to look for the most humble individual I knew. These, for me, are the people worthy of attention.

water in a white bucket

At the doctor's office I talked some with another nurse I know there, Julie, who was telling me about where she lives, just down the road and in sight of the little church I went to that is now closed and locked up, dust on the benches. They called them benches, not pews. Pews wouldn't sound right to the hillbilly ear. Sounds like you're trying to be up there with the big shots that talk perfect English. Any sign of uppity behavior was, and is, dealt with immediately by anybody nearby. Parents, friends, relatives, anybody you know or don't know. It's the culture. You don't act like you think you're somethin special. Sure as you do, you'll be shown right away you are not, whatever method it takes. Very strict code. My city background and college education are something of a wall between me and the working mountain people. It's a low wall now, easy to step over, no higher than a curb. To them, that puts me in the class of the people they work for. And teachers. First thing I have to do when I meet someone new of these hills is just show them by my behavior, the attention I pay to them when they talk, and laugh when they say something funny, kind of like in a secret society without saying it let them know I don't feel I'm better than anybody around me. I look up to them. I appreciate them. I am one of them, naturalized and in the heart. They learn I live by their code, appreciate them, love them, by asking around, You know this feller? What have you heard about him? What kind of a feller is he? Soon they'll find somebody who knows me and get the country equivalent of, he's cool, or, he's an arrogant piece of shit, or whatever suits the individual speaking. I've earned the trust of some hard core people, which I value as much as a medal of honor to wear around my neck. When I can earn the trust of people who don't give trust without years of experience (hillbillies), I feel like I have accomplished something important in the experience of being human. I've become that way about trust, too, and like it. It serves. Everyone I know has learned I don't talk about them behind their backs and don't tell their business. Took the car to my mechanic today. He went for a drive with it to get the feel of what I'd described to him. He keeps the radio on WPAQ in Mt Airy. They played an outa sight old-time fiddle tune, a great hillbilly fiddle tearing it up with banjo a-cluckin so good it made me listen close. It set me to flatfootin on the cement floor in the garage with nobody a-lookin.    

my blue ridge mountain home

 

 

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LENDING A HAND

 

 

all images the air bellows outdoor museum of art

The theme song of my life sang in the front of my mind today every time I settled and relaxed. This world is not my home, I'm just a-passin through. If heaven was not my home, Oh Lord what would I do? This heaven that is my home is here, now, my real self, which I have a feeling is opening itself slowly, more quickly in this time of the life than before. It has to do with secure in myself, in who I am, in my own validity as an individual whether treated like a criminal by law enforcement or thought too well of by people who don't know me. I value individual rights, probably because I was taught it all the way through school as American freedom and liberty. The rough edges I'm experiencing in this time of the life is seeing the tightening down of laws and attitudes. The people running things now were schooled by a generic educational system that went by true or false, multiple choice. It's like in school all the time in our lives now. Make a mistake and you lose points, get a bad grade. We're so hyper detail oriented now as a society because our education is about memorizing details. A head full of details is what we call knowledge. It's definitely not wisdom. After sixteen years of school, my head amounted to a trivial pursuit game. Would John Berryman be:  a) symbolist poet, b) beat poet, c) confessional poet, d) concrete poet? True or false: Herman Melville wrote The Tropic of Cancer.

As an individual who has lived in this body awhile, long enough there comes a time when going on out looks like the best way to go. We are souls with bodies. Take off the body like taking off clothes for a shower. Shake that old skin loose, wiggle out of it. It's hard for ego to conceive of nonexistence, hard for mind, too. By nonexistence I mean without the body, thinking of the body as existence. But I question it being that narrow. It's the soul with a body we call existence. The soul without the body also "exists," if it can be said that spirit exists. I'm inclined to think it does. Seems like the spirit would be the core of existence. The issue that bothers me about living so long is the tightening down. It's come to the place we need a filing cabinet in the house, a tall one. The computer has tightened us down in an advanced way. The society all around me is tightening down like a plumber's wrench twisting a bolt with intent that it will never come loose. Over the years this progression has been the way of American society, I've been loosening myself from the belief systems that go with making money, allowing my own flow. My human flow is slower than the pace of keeping up with all around me. Withdraw further inward. Stay home more. Paint more. Read more. Work on projects at home. I don't understand the world around me. And don't want to.

I like living in a rural community where an awful lot of people like their neighbors and even speak well of them. There is always gossip, but I've come to see gossip as another ingredient in the glue that holds a community together. The people of this county I know look to others with an open readiness to lend a hand whenever needed. Last week, some people from Winston-Salem walking to the waterfalls parked in a place they did not know was soggy ground after much rain. Stuck. I was appealed to for a shovel. I stood around and talked with them and didn't do anything. When they came out of the fix, gratitude was heaped on me, and I was thinking, for what? All I could say was, "It's what we do in the mountains." There was never a thought of inconvenience. Somebody appeals for help, you go do what you can. It's a silent mountain code, one that nearly everybody lives by, simply because it is a belief in the culture, mother's milk it might be called, and daddy's knots on your head, you give help where help is needed. As long as I've lived here, it has been a truth that when something happens to your car, you're on the side of the road unable to go, the first pickup that passes will stop and ask if you need help. The population is now half people from city suburbs who don't know about the code. Those old cultural attributes of the mountains are specific to the mountain people.

 

 

 

In the coffee shop yesterday, somebody asked why I live here, meaning it. My mind went empty. I couldn't even imagine compressing it into a phrase, even a paragraph. It's my entire being that wants me here. This is my home that was waiting to be found. It was waiting for me, the old Air Bellows school house, live-in graduate school. Move in and learn. I didn't say any of that. All I could say was it's the home of my soul. To explain beyond that would have to be at a table with some good liquor to sip and a lot of time. Nobody who asks such a question ever wants to hear the story of its inevitability. He wanted to know if I knew somebody here or had relatives here. It didn't compute with him that my path led me here. I didn't know anybody. Didn't have any idea of the culture I had moved into. I set out to learn mountain culture from my school house of one. When it comes to ideals for education, seems like a school of one is the ideal. Learn by experience. Learn by knowing people. Learn by working. Learn by listening. I don't know even close to what can be known about mountain culture, but I know enough to respect the culture itself and the people who live it. My respect is such that I aspire to many of their values. I don't have it by mother's milk, but I have it by grandmother's love and grandfather's blood. This is the place where my soul is satisfied. This is the place where I have learned to have a heart affection for my neighbors.

 

 photos by tj worthington

 

 

 

 

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FOR YOUR BENEFIT

hat and feet

A few days ago I was told rather straight forwardly that I don't appreciate what the white middle class suburbanites are bringing to the mountains. What? Country clubs? Big ugly houses? I was told conversationally in one statement with much concern for my benefit. Like I'm missing out on something, not being fair to myself that her agenda is not mine. I oughta, needta, gotta, should. There is so much I'm missing because I don't pay enough attention to the people of the culture I left screaming like Munch's The Scream, finding it a black hole to nowhere. It's like my fundamentalist mother telling me I'm not afraid enough of satan's power. People of the middle class have more money than I have. All the more reason for me to suck up to them. The only thing I could think: I don't know what the hell you're talking about.

old-time fiddle

I've known white suburban middle class people, a lot of them in friendly ways. Some of my best friends are in the white middle class. Cocktail parties at the Club? Is that what I'm missing? Something else I'm missing is everything happening in New York, everything happening in Paris, everything happening in Tokyo, everything happening in Istanbul. I'm actually missing almost everything that is happening on earth. So what if I miss a white middle class cocktail party? So what if I don't meet somebody whose ass I'm expected to kiss? I'd rather watch almost any movie. And I'm not interested in taking orders on how I'm to conform to this and conform to that, talk right, leave off that hillbilly twang in your accent, it sounds dumb, and the meaningless phrases you use. Talk natural. Of course, this was somebody who pays zero attention to mountain working class culture. Eew! They're not politically correct and care so little for appearance.

mountain lake

 

The more that bitchy statement she'd been holding for the right chance to slip it in stays with me, the more irritated I get. What she was telling me is what people in certain circles are saying about me. I was swelling up inside to say something like, You've just told me you're a gossipy uno-what who will jump to other people's biddings to tell somebody what you mistakenly think they need to hear. I assessed her not worth an effort to explain my reasonings or my heart. Or anything. I've known several like her, men too. I'd liked her and found her rather a bright light. I prefer to be around somebody who is not a meddler in other people's business. I'd been wondering about her. She has a sincerity that I have not been able to distinguish real or fake. Yesterday I found it fake. She's not the bright light I gave her credit for. I don't ever have any shit like this with my mountain friends. Maybe because they're my friends and she's not. All she knows about me is the gossip she's heard. By now, I expect she has reported to the gossip fold my absence of interest in what she had to say. She came to tell me about myself and told me without knowing it the gossip she's hearing and where she's hearing it. She wants to fix my outsider status. I couldn't waste time telling her I came to the mountains to get away from people like her and her gossip set, not to go to cocktail parties and wine tastings with them.

big-eyed cat

I suspect the reason I'm so irritated is that I'd thought better of her. I'm disappointed. I am here in the mountains for my own reasons that have nothing to do with her or her gossip set. I don't care about gossip. It's what we humans do. I accept it as that and don't care what they're saying about me, don't want to know, because they are not the reason I'm here. I have my own life, my own reason for being, and don't give the remotest shit for what gossipers are saying about me. I don't want to know. I don't want to be pulled into their gossip drama being told what they're saying. I had a friendly disposition toward her gossip set until yesterday. I won't be unfriendly, but I know now not to be open with any of them, about anything.

charlotte 600

I thank her for putting me through a mind review of the reasons for coming to the mountains and staying in the mountains that I have maintained all along and will go on maintaining. Like writing this blog, the only purpose is to write something every day that might be worth reading. It's purpose is to discipline myself to write something every day. That is my only agenda. As for conforming to the checklist of correctness required to rub elbows with the white middle class, it's not something I think about and don't like it brought to my attention as something I oughta, needta, gotta, better do for my own benefit. Like she knows what my benefit is. I've found along the way that people who are interested in my own good are really interested in their own good. And I thank you, dear reader, for putting up with my rant. It helps throw it out of my mind. It put a little knot in my heart I'll have to untie over the next few days. Maybe I'll listen to a lot of old-time music, the music that opens my heart. A couple days ago I heard on the radio Hazel Dickens singing West Virginia My Home. That song fills me with so much love I want to be in West Virginia. It pulls me through thinking about how much I love these mountains and their people. Tears of joy ran down my cheeks.

vada

 

 

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FULL MOON RAMBLE

gerhard richter, green, blue, red

In the mountain people, I like the blind support of their own for no matter what. I've been thinking recently about something two of Jr Maxwell's friends told me on the day his spirit left the body. At two different times, "You get into any kind of trouble, all of Whitehead will back you up." It was told in a way that was convincing, simply stated. That has been one of the great honors of my life. I move into a tight mountain community when I was 34, so in the second half of my life I worked in the mountains in the world of the mountain people, learning their ways. It was precisely what I wanted, to move to another culture that I I found in Alleghany, my piece of the mountain pie. I came with the vow to myself that I will not live among farming people with the attitude that I'm here to teach them what is important from a city point of view. I'm here to learn from them. I paid close attention from first day, wanting to learn the culture from the inside. I don't feel it necessary to dive in and change who I am just to identify more totally with people I can never be completely one of. It would be pretentious to make any attempt to be other than who I am. My answer to why is I see no other way to be in the world, not of the world without being nonconformist/unconventional in every way.

I'm not "in every way." Fact is, I'm terrifically conventional in many ways. I call it camouflage. With a conventional verneer I can live in the world among the people around me and not stand out too much for negative attention. Less visible that way. Probably learned it from parents where nothing about who I am was valid, so I kept it to myself and pretended I was the mold of their intent. Playing pretend for camouflage. Nothing I did living with them was ever right and I knew it would never be right in my adult life, so I left them and went as far as land allowed to have distance between me and their Baptist judgment. My way or the highway. I took the highway. The arrogance of believing I have the only correct answer there is because I go to a certain church and the preacher sez is ludicrous in a denigrating way. This last election got on my last nerve with the absolutism of the so-called Christians. They are not Christians. They are Churchists. Christians have compassion for the poor and help them out. American "Christians" want to take social security and medicare away from everybody. I maintain they should have their social security and medicare revoked and leave the rest of us be. If you don't approve, don't do it. Leave the rest of us alone

Missionarism is the greatest probelm I have with Christendom, besides the absence of use for the poor: it's their fault, let them suffer, they're losers. The preachers want to take the Bible, esp the Old Testament, and make it literal. The part they consitently overlook and read around, under and over is God is love. Three words is pretty easy to interpret. Love is a four-letter word not to be spoken in church. God hates fags! No God doesn't. The one hating is the one holding the sign. God doesn't mind if we project our hate onto God. It's delusional, but if that's how you have to see it, love allows. Go ahead, believe what you gotta believe. It's like the way a river receives mud and the clear water becomes like chocolate milk. The noise from the Christian-right has nothing to do with love, as far as I can tell from my experience.

My Baptist mother tells me I must believe in Satan. Too much focus on Satan has turned the Baptist religion to a religion of hate. They fell for the same lure that got John Milton. Satan became a much more interesting character than God. He's glamorous like a pope draped in silk and adorned by gold jewelry. Or a television evangelist with fake hair andgold spigots in the bathroom. It's so much easier to preach fear of hell than love for others and helping the poor, having a compassionate attitude toward all. I can't say I've ever known a non Christian as judgmental as anyone going about announcing their Christian faith, and the only thing they're telling me is they're republicans. Cementheads. Somebody really on the spiritual path does not go about telling it. It's nobody else's business to somebody actually on the path. And people really on the path never go about shouting God hates anything.

The interface on the blogger site tonite has pushed me to stop. I can't struggle with this any longer. Write a phrase and the cursor goes away, computer locks for about 15 seconds, then if I don't type a phrase right away, the cursor goes away and I have to wait for it to come back. It is necessary to end struggling with it. This is the NEW-IMPROVED interface.


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R-E-S-P-E-C-T

sitting bull

I've been hearing on the Charlotte FM station advertising recently for something of a workshop on Respect. The talk that goes with it tells that respect is something gone away from society and we need it back. My thought first time I heard it: Hmm, somebody noticed. I have to agree, in the urban world respect is absent and not missed as if it never had been, though in certain circles rappin gangstas kill each other for "disrespect." The workshop situation is for the white middle class, NPR listeners. In the white working class you still find respect. I'm wondering how much the falling away of respect in middle class mind has to do with the fast fade of old institutions in our time where respect was important. As they go away, respect goes with them, evidently. I'm wondering about the absence of community in the suburban middle class, what a sense of community has has to do with respect. I can say that in my own community in the NC mountains, Whitehead immediately and the whole county generally, a great deal of respect is going around. In what is left of mountain culture, an individual is respected for humility, for honesty, for helping others, and of course, for money. Anybody with money is respected everywhere in America, the world. That's part of the appeal for accumulating money, especially in a world where there's little to no respect for anything else.

People know each other in a rural community. A lot of people complain about the gossip and go to cities to get away from gossip, but they find it there too. I've come to see gossip as a kind of glue that keeps a community aware of the different individuals in the community like they're movie stars. In my first years in the mountains listening to Tom Pruitt tell about his life and people he'd known along the way, I noticed he spoke of the people of his community with the same tone of importance that city people talk about tv and movie stars. He spoke of the people in his world the same as people spoke of celebrities where I came from. I saw the people of his telling in my mind a little bit bigger than life. When I met different ones I'd heard him talk about, his brother Millard, for one, I was struck every time by seeing this is just another person, not a celebrity. They kind of shrank in my mind at first, seeing they were not celebrities. That caused me to adjust my own thinking. I came to see, knowing other mountain people of Tom's generation that this is how people talked about each other before radio, movies and tv started bringing celebrities into our lives. Now, we talk about celebrities with respect, and each other with watered down derision for not being celebrities.

I realized that the tone of voice Tom was using when he told about different people of the community was respect. It took me awhile to get there, because it took me awhile to catch on to respect as not only something valid, but important. When we look up to celebrities, we look at all the people around us, and ourselves, as they call us in the News, the ordinary people. Celebs are special and we're ordinary. My parachute landed me in a world where they hadn't caught on yet that celebrities were important and we were ordinary. I was seeing that the people all around me saw each other and themsleves the same kind of important accorded to celebrtities. A few months ago there was a buzz around that Robert Downey Jr had been to a certain country store in the county. Very big deal! It was like somebody came in from Celebrity Planet and wowed the people of Ordinary Planet. I confess, I was was impressed one of my favorite American actors had been in the county. Several people I know wished they could have met him. All I could think was, what would I say? You're really cool, meaning I'm really not.

It's like passing up a chance to meet Ralph Stanley. The people around him say, "He's just a man," which I already know. He's a country boy from the same generation of several people I've known here. His county, Dickenson in SW Virginia, is much like my county, Alleghany in NC, though he's in coal country and I'm not. That is definitely a difference. I've seen him up close a few times at concerts, like when he was at the table autographing for fans. He was the same size and weight, talked like and even walked the same as Tom's brother Millard, the Regular Baptist preacher who had a voice for singing as hauntingly beautful as Ralph Stanley's. I know he's just a man, and I could speak with him on that level. However, at the same time that he's just a man, he's also Ralph Stanley. I'm in awe of Ralph Stanley and believe my respect for the celebrity would obscure the man himself. I still have the sense that celebrities are beyond the ordinary. I hear an interview with artist Robert Motherwell and listen to every word like it's from Truth itself. I hear a local artist I know talking and it's the same as any other "ordinary" person talking. If I knew Motherwell, I would have been hearing just a man instead of the celebrity great artist.

Respect is one of my great learnings from living in mountain culture. There was a time when I believed the white middle class people moving from the suburbs to the exurbs might take an interest in the fact that a really interesting culture is all around them. I would tell new people I'd meet that you can get along very well with any individual of these mountains by treating them with basic human respect. I didn't realize then that respect outside these mountains was waning down to nothing in the middle class. They didn't care. I was flapping my jaws, barking to hear my head roar. Too many times I got a look like, What? I quit making any attempts to make one small step toward easing off the conscious and unconscious disrespect for the mountain people by the intruders. It's an assets point of view, not a cultural point of view. Mountain people have less assets than the people moving in. According to the law of the money and status ladder, you look up, never down. Respect is not a consideration for somebody living in a trailer and working in a factory. How do you respect somebody wearing work boots? How do you respect somebody in a tshirt that says Guns N Roses? Mammon is not a benevolent god, but a god devoid of compassion, love and understanding. I'll go with the god of love and be so poor I have to look up to everybody.

By the latter years of my life I've found my "place" in the world several years ago and I'm happy with it. I'm recalling my friend Jr Maxwell the time I asked him who he looked up to along the way in his life. He said, "I look up to everybody." I felt like I knew what he meant at the time he said it, though after knowing him as years went by, I saw he was not making up something that sounds good for public persona, which I already knew. That kind of thinking was not in him. He did, indeed, look up to everybody. He regarded everyone, low or high, with respectful attention. When you talked to Jr, he heard you. Everyone he knew, he knew for who the individual was, not the what. He respected the man who made big money and bought the biggest house on the highest hill the same as he respected the man working for him at the sawmill who threw all his money away drinking on the weekends. Jr might have thought it heedlessly self-defeating behavior, but he was a man just the same. Jr regarded people he did not trust the same as people he trusted. He recognized you have to watch out for one and you don't have to watch the other. Both are valid human beings deserving at least basic respect for their humanity. Of all my learnings from mountain people I've known, the one characteristic that every one of them embodies is respect. I'm coming to believe respect holds community together, too. I see where there is no community, respect is just a word on a spelling test.


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