THE WAY OF THE WHITE OWL

victor vasarely

I've been entertaining the question today of where I am going in this life. What was my dream for myself that made me make one decision and not another along the way? It's a bit of a puzzler considering I've not aimed for success in any kind of way but within. I've not wanted to climb ladders to success. I find, looking back, I've never had any confidence in the future. It came from the old Protestant insistence that one may die at any moment. If there was anything I learned for certain in childhood and youth was I can go poof any minute. I waited til after my draft obligation to play soldier was finished, in the past, before continuing my education. I thought, why go to college and get a head full of hope, then be killed by the war machine for being born male in a country with an economy based in war profits? What choice did I have? None. Canada was not an answer. To go to Canada is a tactic, not a strategy. To what end? To get away. The momentum of my thinking through high school and a year or so later was to get away. Did not know where I wanted to go. Only knew that I wanted to get away. Wichita, Kansas, is in the middle of the continent, giving me a choice of coast to go to, each one the same distance as far as land allows. It didn't matter, actually. Away was all I wanted. I was listening to jazz at the time, early 1960s, tail end of the Bebop period. I liked East Coast jazz better than West Coast jazz, preferred Thelonious Monk to George Shearing, The East Coast had history. The West Coast had less history. Picking the East Coast was not a strategy, but a tactic. I was also drawn to the South. The South had a powerful mystique for the kid. I have a feeling the seed for that mystique was planted by reading a child's biography of Robert E Lee in third grade. We had to read a certain number of books of our own choice from the library. I wanted to find out about the name that at that time in my life represented the South. I think I fell in love with the South in the course of reading this book. 

victor vasarely

I didn't know anything about Dixiecrat politics in the early 1950s, but I remember at election time the Solid South. I liked about the South that it defied the Yankees and stood up to them. They were beat down, but they stood up. They stood up to authority for me when I could not. Of course, it was romanticized in the child's mind into something it was not, a sentiment. Though I went to the South, it was still getting away, just further away into a new mind. From living in the South my entire adult life, I forget how foreign the South is seen from outside the South. In the South, we think it's great when people from outside the South don't like the South. Stay where you are, don't come here. Leave us alone; that's all we want from you. People from outside the South feel funny when they enter the South. I sure did the first time. I thought I was in the place my soul wanted to be. By this time in my life, I don't ever want to leave the South again. I feel creepy when I cross the Mason Dixon line leaving the South. It was like passing from France into Germany after WW2. Not just a foreign country, but a serious grudge. Even though I like to think my mind on a higher plane than worrying over national / cultural boundaries, belief systems, it's not. I can drive through Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and feel at home, in my country. The other side of the line is as different for me as going to England. In a few days, I'm ready to return to my territory. Yes, I am a territorial two-legged. I need my country, need my culture, my people, from American people to Southern people, to mountain people, to the county's people, to my friends and neighbors, to my Blue Ridge Mountain home. 

victor vasarely

It wasn't until around 1990 or later that the momentum generated in childhood, boyhood and youth to get away, as far away as land allows, faded into the fog of time . I didn't want to leave the country. Away did not include expat. It's neither the flag nor the illusion of democracy that appeals. The Americans are my people. The first subculture, Southerners are my people, The next subculture, the people of the Southern Appalachian mountains, are my people. The people I see in a day are my people. It wasn't until I realized this that one day my heart opened and I knew a nonjudgmental love for everyone around me. It didn't change my behavior but to pay closer attention to everyone I interacted with, give everyone honest respect. It was in that time the volume of mind's the need to get away turned down to nothing. I saw the value of the world my parachute landed me in. I don't even like to cross the county line anymore. I disappeared into a world as unknown to Southerners as Southerners are to Yankees, the world of the hillbillies. The farthest I could get geographically as well as mentally. The human heart is alive and well in these hills. I recall from maybe age 13 or 14 an intuition that my life would be one of much change. I wanted to be open to the changes. As a result of that intuition, or insight, or whatever it was, I made it a point all the way along not to lock myself down into anything I could not leave if need be. Wherever it came from, I believed it. From that same period of time, I saw a white owl in the fork of a Y in the road. I was in a car at night. I came to the Y and the white owl flew down the road to the left and I followed. End of dream. Both seemed important at the time. I didn't know what the changes in the future might be or where the owl went.  

victor vasarely

I believe it can be fairly assessed by now that I have been through at least most of the changes and must be where the owl went. The path of experiences that step-by-step brought me to these mountains must be the way the owl pointed. Being open to changes turned out to be necessary several times, but that's inevitable any way you look at it. It appears the interior changes paralleled the changes on the outside. Turns out, it is inner unfoldment I've been open to along the way. As far as I remember back, I never wanted to join the parade. I didn't believe the parade. Reenactments are boring. I've looked for the spirit in this world, the energy that activates this world, which is a manifestation of the spirit, operates on the same principles as the spirit.  The Christ goes among us explaining  it is experiential, everything comes back, an invisible principle as reliable as gravity. So the conscious individual puts out into the world what he / she wants in the return. As above, so below. The world of the spirit, or you might say the mind, directs the physical dimension. I have found that when a change occurs within, I will see a change in the world around me. Some people I know will fall away and new ones come in to take their places. It's a hard saying, but the people around us are expressions of aspects of our own individual selves. And we are that to them. Inside myself, I like to be firmly grounded though not locked down grounded. Grounded like a battery needs a ground. I believe I'm having an earth experience this lifetime, not an after-death experience. I've come to see the scriptures all over the world concern inner peace. This is what I've pursued all the way along without knowing to put it in these words. I believe I do have interior peace now. Maybe it is just the slowed mind of a certain age. Mind runs all the time, though without entertaining worries, fears, same thing. I'm not one of the white men my age bitching and griping all the time about immigrants. This is what I've lived my life in poverty for, inner peace. I'm glad in hindsight I followed the bird, glad I asked self the question earlier in the day what I've been moving toward.

victor vasarely himself

*

ROOTS

farmer bob doughton



I like it that the man whose head stands on a marble pedestal on the courthouse lawn is named after Robert E Lee. Robert Lee Doughton. Lots of Robert Lees around the South. I've known 2 and probably more and didn't know it. A few weeks ago something came to me I'd forgotten about since summer before third grade. I had to read a biography of somebody and picked Robert E Lee. I knew nothing about him and was curious. Something pulled me to him, I knew not what. I believe, looking back, that that child's biography was the beginning of the mystique the South held for a kid in Kansas City who fantasized being anywhere else, as far from KC as possible, the opposite side of the globe, Tibet, India. I fantasized those places when feeling miserable wanting to be anywhere else, just another house would do with different people in it. Robert E Lee stood up to the Yankees, to the North, to the United States of America. He lost and lost, but stood his ground, loyal to the South, the homeland. Perhaps his devotion to the South seeded my own.



All the time growing up I paid attention on election night on tv what the Solid South was doing. I liked Strom Thurmond and that governor of Georgia I saw ride a bicycle backwards in a St Patrick's Day Parade in Savannah, Georgia, early 1970s, whose name I can't think of. I didn't know what they were about politically. It just told me the South was different, and different was what I wanted. All the way along, the South was in the corner of my eye, a peephole in my attention. I knew nothing about what was different about the South except states like Mississippi and Alabama where cops gave you a ticket just for having an out of state license. That part of it seemed like a dangerous dark hole to fall into and it was scary. Those white boys from big cities up North getting offed by some Mississippi good ole boys gave the South an even more interesting mystique. A frightening edge where you better watch every step you take. Like walking in the mountains; don't step on a snake and you're ok. Strom Thurmond was a big man to me, because, like Robert E Lee, he stood up to the Yankees, like Sitting Bull stood up to the US Army, the white man. It looks kind of obvious I was looking for somebody to admire with the courage to stand up to white man, to oppressive authority, to daddy.



I liked the Rebel about the South. If I'd lived in this place in that time and had the choice of Yank or Reb, it wouldn't be a decision. My soul couldn't live with me if I did something to the benefit of the North against the interest of the South. It's that strong in me and I'm glad my great great grandfather and his 4 brothers were Rebs in the Civil War. All returned but one, who died in a Yankee prison in New Jersey. Every time I hear or think of Jimmy Arnold's song, the Rebel Soldier, who is dying in a Yankee prison, "tell me parson, tell me quickly, will my soul pass through the Southland?" I feel it every time I hear it, how dreadful it must be to die outside the Southland. Though I don't know hardly anybody, probably just a few hundred people I can say I know, I love everyone in the South. And even more than that, I love everyone in the mountains. The Southern Mountains are the home of my soul. It was an interesting and educational journey getting here by way of 10 years in a Deep South city that was still in the Old South, went to a college that was still in the Old South. I caught the tail end of the Old South, just enough to get a feel of it, the culture. When I was first in Charleston, the police force was such that a cop walked into my rented room and told me to shut my mouth or he'd have something on me by the time we got to the station. He knew I wasn't Southern. And I was catching on that I was really in the South.



There is a certain venality toward them that don't share the same ideas about certain things. I learned that one right off. And was glad to learn it. Don't get smart with cops in my own space. That was in the time when the Charleston police dept was a gang of thugs. Old South cliches. The way things were all the way across the South. This is the law of the South. Your Yankee (Kansas) ass can turn around and take you back to where you come from. I learned that the law of the land is the law I live by too. What the badge and gun mean is they can do anything to me they want and I can't even defend myself. I get it. I can get a lawyer if I want, but they've already kicked my ass and a lawyer aint doin nothing about it. I didn't want to go back where I came from. I wanted to learn to live peaceably in the South. To a degree, I did. Not always, but less and less frequently is there a disturbance of inner peace. The South, like these mountains, is my Home Sweet Home. And the song, Sweet Sunny South. What a beauty. And Take Me Back To The Blue Ridge Mountains that Scott and Willard sing every week.



The only way I could leave the South would be sentenced by a judge to a prison in the North. I'd mourn day and night. The occasional sound of a banjo or fiddle would bring tears every time. When I see the sign by the side of the highway that says Mason-Dixon Line it only feels good when I'm crossing back into the South. Leaving the South, it's like crossing into a foreign country, potentially enemy territory. But that's not going to happen. I'll go on in my Air Bellows home til death do us part. No Yankee prison for me. It's not in my future. First, I became a naturalized Southerner, the slow way, and then a naturalized hillbilly, the slow way again. From being born out of place in wartime, it took 34 years to find my Home Sweet Home. First, I learn the ways of the South, then the ways of the mountains. I had to grow my way into the mountains. Since I turned my way over to the Master one year before coming to the mountains, I took it at the time as His Grace that got me here, and every day since. He knew where I belonged. He landed my parachute in the Air Bellows Schoolhouse, and I've been learning ever since, learning the ways of the mountains.



About the first 15 years I got acquainted with the landscape, the mountains. The next 15 years I became acquainted with the people. By now I love them equally. I feel at home as in grandmother's arms in the Southern Mountains. The music is the only music I've ever heard that makes tears run down my face for the beauty of it. I heard myself tell a friend from Georgia this evening that I've come to the place with mountain music that I think of it anymore as just plain music. All other kinds of music branches off it. We of the mountains laugh at the music being called roots music. As far as I can tell, it's the whole tree. I still hear old-time in punk rock, skateboard punk. It went electric. The old-time way of making music was such that if it made you tap your foot, even against your will, or want to get up and dance, it's music. If it doesn't do that, it's not music. That causes me to ask, then, what is it Aerosmith does? You can't dance to it, but it has a beat and melodies and all. It's old-time plugged in and cut loose. I tend to see old-time the tree trunk itself. The branches blues, country, bluegrass, rock&roll. Old-time has stretched out all the way to techno.



This evening my visiting friend asked about my roots. I answered, Ninemile, Tennessee and Somerset, Kentucky. She said, No, roots like Scotland or Ireland. My poor old mind never wanders over there. There, indeed, are the roots of the tree that is our music, the British Isles. This is why I am not comfortable with it called roots. But I may not be seeing it the way others see it. I might be a bit local-centric. Probably roots music means all the varieties of music around the world before electricity in the age of fire. I can go with that, our old-time one of many, considering Texicano music, Indian music, Polish music and a whole long list. The tree trunk itself raw music, the branches everything that's happening musically in the present. I've never seen it like that before, but it'll do. When I answer the question of my roots with Tennessee and Kentucky, I verify my identity with the South and mountain culture. One of the happiest days of my life was the day I learned of grandpa being born at Ninemile, Tennessee, to Dora Hale Worthington of Bledsoe County, Tennessee, greatgrandmother I remember from ages 4-7. I can't recall features, but remember the feeling of being held by her.