PAT AND JOHN AND THE OLD-TIME FIDDLE

vincent van gogh

It's been a couple days of good vibrations all day long, good feeling, good vibes, good friends. This morning started with a phone call minutes after I woke up. From then on, seeing people of the first circle around my heart, friends of many years. Friend I wrote of yesterday, our forgiveness story, called wanting to know where he can find a banjo for his youngun, who wants to learn to make music. He has talked with the kid at length about school sports like football: kids come out of football with permanent physical problems, and when you're out of school, football is over. He told the kid if you want to learn something after school, learn to make music. You can play a banjo the rest of your life into old age. Why do something that comes to nothing when it will only bring you broken bones and concussions? I felt like it was sound counsel to be passing to a kid just starting out in his life. I feel like making music would be an immense help to the kid all the way through school and the rest of his life. If he takes to it, the great unknown. He talked at length. The donkeys heard my footsteps in the house and were braying for me to bring carrot and hay. Caterpillar wanted her catfood. She maoed repeatedly unto the pleading mao with the upturn at the end. All I could do was show her my open hand to mean, not now. She finally gave up in frustration, turned and went to the bedroom to her bed. He kept on talking, donkeys at the fence pleading to me with their eyes through the window. I went to the refrigerator, put three carrots in a pocket and went out the door with the phone. I didn't have to talk. I carried the wireless phone taking carrots to the donkeys, fed them carrot chunks with the phone in one hand. At the moment I thought he was done, he needed to tell me about a bar-B-Q place to take somebody I really want to impress. You can get out of there for less than ten dollars. He described every detail in the place, exactly how to get there. It seems like it could have been annoying, but it was not. This is one of the few people whose dark side I know as well as the light side. His dark side is definitely from hell, hell within, and his light side is a wonderful human being with a true heart. A mountain boy, who is who he is and no apologies. 

vincent van gogh

He talked the whole time I gave Jack and Jenny their morning carrots, and let me go when I was about ready to throw them hay, needing two hands. I was amused. He's funny when he gets going, tells good stories, explains endlessly and makes everything funny, except when he's talking about the twenty people that want to kill him, "and four of them mean it." Keeps him alert. I figure it keeps his heart pumping. It's his life he made for himself the way he wants it. It's his business, not mine, unless I happen to be around when the drive-by he's expecting with A-Ks occurs. He was funny to listen to, as always, like a stand-up comic with a telephone and an audience of one. Adjusting the blue tarp over the bales of hay, John and Pat's car came down the road and parked by the mailbox. I was still in the clothes I slept in--even slept in a sweater last night, it that kind of cold--with a jacket on to keep out the cold. They came inside and we talked awhile. I suggested I make some Ethiopian coffee and they wanted to go to town to eat, it being almost noon. I thought what the hell: I probably smell fairly rank in the clothes I wear at home. I've managed my wardrobe such that I sleep in the clothes I wear during the day at home. If I don't go to town for four days, I wear and sleep in the same clothes for four days. I think I'd slept two nights in what I wore today. I told myself that everywhere we go, I'll know people and they all know my scent anyway. If they didn't before, this their day. Therein lies the freedom that goes with white hair and a certain age. If I carried a cane, people would open doors for me. That sorry old man can't take care of hisself no more. It's with this license I put a hat on going out the door, no more concerns about my scent preceding me. Pat and John and I are close enough that we fart with no problem. We drove to town to the Tex-Mex restaurant, Mis Arados, had a good brunch and good conversation. They live near Hillsdale, NY, on the Massachusetts line. Pat said she can see Massachusetts from her kitchen window. I likened her to Sarah Palin, who makes us both bend over laughing and throwing up at the same time.  

vincent van gogh

Pat and I go back to 1975 in Charleston. In the next year, I moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains and she moved to NYC. She and John met in the City and have been together ever since. They reproduced twice, two intelligent, beautiful grown girls, who have a personal friend relationship with their mother and will all their lives. She is who she is and she has allowed her girls who they are. All their lives they've had a free-thinking character for a mother. John is the same kind of dad for them. He has watched Wizard of Oz at least a hundred times with one of his babies sitting on one leg, the other on the other leg, watching it with them every time they wanted to see it. The girls grew up feeling safe that John was their papa. Both Pat and John stood up for them, caught them, encouraged them along. They're both fabulous women now. I mean by fabulous, my own estimation of them as what I call true human beings, women who, like their mother, are who they are, no apologies. They are people I'm humbled by the opportunity to know. I saw them grow up and was awed by them through childhood and on up. I feel blessed that these are my dear friends. That they are my friends is certainly a blessed experience. John was looking for a hand-made fiddle. I called a musician friend in SW Virginia and asked for some tips on who is making fiddles and has them for sale. He gave me the name of one in Boone, then added he had one for sale, one he's owned for several years and played a lot; in fact, played it that morning. I told him we'd be by there in a few hours, will have lunch and hit the road. John has a friend who plays fiddle and offered to teach him to play for no charge. John wants to learn something challenging to exercise brain in a time of life when you use-it-or-lose-it. He assessed the fiddle a considerable challenge. Friend told him to start with a good fiddle. Since he's going to the Blue Ridge, he'll have a good chance to find one hand-made. 

vincent van gogh

The fiddle is made by Robert Glier, of Cincinnati,1855-1924. He evidently was known for a lot of fiddle for the bucks. It has a rich, full sound. It has tiger striped wood on the back and the neck. The man made violins all his working life. He left Germany age 30. I'd say he learned his craft in Germany, more than likely an apprentice, trained in the old world way of fiddle making, sound its purpose. I'd reckon these mountains have a number of his fiddles, especially up around Kentucky, West Virginia, eastern Ohio, Virginia. A lot of traditional music has been played on Glier's fiddles. That my friend who sold it, Scott, owned it is a testament to its sound. He's been buying his instruments from friends in the region who make fiddles. I suspect he needed to get rid of the one that was not made locally to help pay for a new one by someone he knows. John was happy with his find. The price was right, the source was right, the time was right, the fiddle was right. He's looking forward to showing future fiddle teacher his find. We fell into a good flow the whole time they were here. None of us had an agenda, none of us was in a hurry, we relaxed and went with the flow. On the way back I suggested we stop by and see my friend Carole, who I wanted to meet them and them to meet her. I called her on John's cell phone. She was receptive to a drop-in. Carole fell into our flow, like stepping into the boat with us, and we had an open, free-flowing conversation in a circle in her sitting area, which just happened that way. Good vibes. They were as if they'd known each other twenty or more years. Before Carole's, we ran into a friend of Carole's and mine, Beth, when Pat was shopping for a wire for her i-pad to facilitate something I don't understand, which could be anything, how to turn it on.            

vincent van gogh by himself

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GRUMPY OLD BASTARD FREAKS OUT

georges braque

Every day I see something in internet news items, interviews, about the importance of changing the world. It appears this generation of the young, teens and twenties, is fixed on changing the world. My generation came up believing it was important to change the world for the better. That was the guiding thread that ran through the generations, wanting to make the world a better place. Until 1980 when the political coup shifted our government into reverse. Thirty-four years later the young are now saying again they want to change the world. Possibly this is the wave of the near future. We have six more years of the Reagan Trojan Horse coup that usurped our government, systematically put an end to democracy and our individual rights to control us by police state. Once something like democracy has gone away, it doesn't come back easily. The American television viewing audience is evidently happy to see it go. But now that we've had time to see the difference between democracy and police state, democracy is becoming appealing. Anyway, to the black people. Now the republicans are using redneck militias to intimidate black people who want to vote. It tells me the vote must matter for something or the fascists wouldn't feel so threatened. I have no confidence in voting, re: the Supremes overruling the popular vote in 2000, rulings they've made before and since. I have completely lost confidence in the American government since the Reagan coup. The American pendulum has a forty year swing of progress and reaction. We've been in thirty-four years of reaction to the progress of the Roosevelt era, during which the John Birch Society was hatched. They organized and took the government by coup. In this time of John Birch Society running our government, more and more people are growing in number to make the world a better place after almost forty years of destruction. 

georges braque

The working class was defeated long ago, left without a voice, and when they did get a voice it turned out to be a propaganda-created delusion, the teabaggers. I'm so weary of the mind of Karl Rove, the master propagandist, it's hard for me to respect a republican. A country club woman in the coffee shop was talking in praise of Charles Krauthammer of False News Network. All I could say was, "You embarrass yourself." Last Saturday I came face to face by chance with our congressional "representative," the Bush-Cheney parrot herself, live, in person, Virginia Foxx, in my face, introducing herself, handing me a business card. I froze. I freaked. I realized demons are not mythological creatures, but go among us in human form. Pretended I didn't recognize her. I only wanted her to go away. I was in friend Crystal's tent she put up at Sparta's downtown "festival," The Mountain Heritage Festival, selling her items and advertising her new sign making business. While Virginia was trying to talk to me I pointed at Crystal, "Talk to her," acting like I was Crystal's grandpa hanging out with nothing to do, don't know nothin, don't wanna know nothin. Crystal had never heard of her, knew nothing of her, pays no attention to news or anything in DC, doesn't vote, doesn't care. Virginia handed Crystal a card and received as blank a look as she got from me. She turned and went on to the next tent. She was going up and down the street introducing herself, handing out cards. As soon as she left, I dropped my card into our trash bag. A little later, thinking I might want to use it for a satirical art project, I picked it out of the trash and put it in my pocket. Reckon I could sell it on e-bay?

georges braque

I might write the date on the business card to have a number for one of my most freaky moments in a long time. I felt in the presence of the false, the totally false with intent to be false. Somebody who cannot recognize an honest word, unable, herself, to speak one. I remind myself that souls new to the human form have a hard time understanding something like the earth a ball rolling around the sun. So what does that have to do with a Budweiser commercial? When a parrot from the dark side "represents" me in DC, I am not represented. I sound like a teabagger harping about liberals. Yin and yang. Duality in action. Opinions are like assholes: everybody's got one. That's all I'm doing here is articulating my opinions. I'm not looking to missionarize my opinions, just to bring them up and look at them, confess to them, examine them, change them. I like my opinions to be fluid as water, not locked into place like a cement block. I'd rather not have opinions, but they somehow seem inevitable, simply as point of view. This is how I see a given opinion in relation to my own experience and assessment of experience. I didn't know what an opinion was until I was out of high school a year or two. Had them before, but didn't know that's what they were. Coming up Baptist, I believed my opinions were truth. I didn't see them as opinions, but as truth. God sez. I'm in van Gogh's mid twenties in the biography, feeling like I have an understanding of his thinking, of his spirit. He came up as I did in church with his male parent the church enthusiast. His family did not alienate him, so it was not easy for him to expand his vision beyond the absolute beliefs of father and mother. His spirit was reaching beyond the confines of tradition, though the tradition he lived in held him in its orbit. He was a born free-thinker, did not want to be a rebel, but the need to follow his own light made him an involuntary rebel within. 

georges braque

Books Vincent read expanded his thinking. He was like a kite on a string, wanting to fly up into the sky, but the umbilical cord of a loving family held him to the tradition his spirit needed to fly away from. Vincent's searching mind led him away from the tradition he was expected to perform in as an obedient employee, make a lot of money, property, family, position. He could not do it. He went on long solitary walks into the country. He was a nerd, somebody with zero social skills. He just did not know how to connect with other people. He had no social skills to start with and finding himself so unsuccessful with people, he went within. He read Thomas Carlyle, who was writing at the time, in English. He could get around in four languages. His absence of social skills made keeping a job difficult for him. Family and the others around him saw him a failure, a loser. And they convinced him he was a loser. I suspect he discovered his own mind on his long walks, went on the walks to enjoy his mind. Nobody understood him anyway, and when he started expanding his mind reading non-academically, which he did much of the time he wasn't working or walking, the people around him understood him less. I've seen Dutch countryside and cities. I've seen London where he spent a year or less. I'm sure we walked in some of the same places, saw the same buildings, experienced the English. This gives me a sense of place when I'm with him there, getting by the best he can. The work he loved doing was teaching children. But it didn't pay anything, just a room and meals, and a jerk to work for. No future in that. I'm having a good time watching him soul search, identifying with myself in that time of my life when all I knew was I could not live the rest of my life under the smothering pillow of religion. Vincent sought on his own as I have sought on my own. It even feels like his life was another version of my life in 19th Century Netherlands. The particulars are very different, but the spirit is awfully close. I've never read somebody's life that paralleled my own so much it feels like I'm reading about me. It's uncanny and it's fun. 

georges braque himself

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VINCENT THE OUTSIDER

vincent van gogh

Am a little over a hundred pages into a relatively new biography of Vincent van Gogh, 2012, by two researchers who write very well. It is a thousand pages, enough to put me under. It's a paperback so big I can't hold it while reading with one hand. I stepped into it a bit uneasily, wondering how far I'd get in it before putting it down the last time. I've read a history of Africa that thick and a history of China that thick, and Tolstoy's War and Peace. It's not that I'm inexperienced with long books, just that experience tells me there comes a time in a really long book that I need a break. Reading War and Peace, I took a month in the middle of it, because I didn't want to finish it any time soon. Closing in on the end of it, I did not want it to end. At the end, I was at a loss. Couldn't read anything else for a month. After a long time of living in Tolstoy's writing, all other was so piddling, it's hardly worth the bother to read. I wanted more Tolstoy biographies, memoirs, letters. I even keep a National Geographic magazine among my books because it has a colorized photograph of Leo in it. He was some kind of wild man. In his younger years, he was military academy, fought in wars an officer on horseback, very well off and had a gambling addiction that took much of his land and fortune. He wrote stories that made him a popular Russian writer from the beginning. When War and Peace struck, he became a Russian icon. He was so beloved by the Russian people, even the Czar had no control over him. Anything the Czar might do to admonish Tolstoy for his independent minded writing would bring the wrath of the Russian people down on the Czar. His power would end that moment, which he knew very well. Tolstoy knew it too. The Czar could censure Dostoevsky and other writers at will, but had to concede Leo Tolstoy carried the real power in Russia.

vincent van gogh

It wasn't because Tolstoy was a great guy. He was not a great guy. It was his writing. He can create a world in your mind's eye that sees everything going on. I remember a girl dancing a mazurka to her uncle playing the balalaika. And I remember a wolf hunt, riding a horse, on the horse's back, the mane flapping. He put me on the back of the horse running all-out after a wolf with the wolfhounds leading. He put me on the back of a horse in Anna Karenina, running in a race on a dirt track. I don't remember his description of it, but I remember the feeling well. This was half a century ago. When I read his writing, I feel like I'm experiencing the apex of the human ability to tell a story. His characters come to life, live throughout the story and later in memory. I'm recalling the appearance of Anna Karenina. The man telling the story, a Leo Tolstoy sort of character, a version of himself, was standing before a painting of Anna Karenina painted by the Russian portraitist of the day, moved by her beauty which became universal beauty. A door opens, and Anna, herself, enters the room. The portrait was as nothing in relation to the living Anna Karenina. Tolstoy's long short story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, had a moment that has stayed with me like a part of myself. When Ivan's spirit was leaving the body, he felt like he was sitting in a train at the station waiting for it to start rolling. He thought he was facing forward, and when the train started moving, he was going backwards. I pick up a book by Tolstoy, and that's it. Finish one, start another. I think I have just about everything he wrote, including letters, on my shelves. He was a major positive influence in my life. I think I picked up Tolstoy the first time inspired by the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Martin Luther King's non-violent protest movement referred back to Gandhi and Thoreau, who were in line with Leo Tolstoy, the first non-violent activist.  

vincent van gogh

I've jumped into a thousand page biography of an artist who has spoken to me over my time visually close to how Tolstoy spoke to me mentally. In some ways, for the same reason, in most ways not. I find "the same" in them that they both are making pictures of life itself. For me, van Gogh's images have the breath of life in them. I feel his painting as I feel Tolstoy's writing. I feel like van Gogh painting flowers was a search for how to show their living energy with paint on canvas. His faces have living, conscious energy. It is the spirit of life I feel like he is attempting to paint on each canvas. I'd been curious about van Gogh for most of my adult life. Irving Stone's writing did not hold my interest. I never paid van Gogh much mind other than appreciation of his painting. I never took an interest in reading the letters with Theo. Didn't even want to see the movie with Kirk Douglas from 1957. I must have missed it when it was new. That was the year of the move from Kansas City to Wichita, during which I missed a lot. It seems like a time outside time. Foremost memory of that time was two weeks before the move, Kansas City tv evening news told about a nineteen year old guy killed in Wichita by a motorcycle gang and left in a ditch. The Fifties was a time of switch-blades, rumbles, motorcycle chains, white gangs and black leather jackets. The Fonze was not even a caricature of that time. Time went by and I decided to see the Kirk Douglas vision of van Gogh, Lust For Life. Did not expect the movie to be anything other than something to get information from, a brief pop culture rendering. Big surprise. It was quite a good film, directed by Vincente Minnelli. By the time it was over, I realized I probably did not see it then because it was an "art film" not shown in mainstream theaters, the only kind I had access to. Or maybe I did see it and forgot it like I forgot hundreds of movies seen in the 1950s.

vincent van gogh

The film made from van Gogh's letters gave such a good depiction of his life, it felt to me that Kirk Douglas brought him to life. It was one of those art of acting jobs where it is Kirk Douglas standing in for van Gogh at the beginning, and by the end it is only van Gogh. Kirk Douglas became him early in the film. Douglas and Minnelli, together, made a living portrait of an artist who painted life itself. I remember arguments from high school years about whether he really saw what he painted. Like, did he really see the sky swirling in air turbulence patterns? Yes, and no. It was how he brought the air to life. He gave the stars the glow we see in them the best it could be rendered two-dimensionally with opaque pigments. So far, in his story, I'm in his early twenties. I've always heard he was insane or something. Though, looking at it from afar, it seemed like in the movie he fell into the place Nijinsky wrote his diary from. I'm curious to see. So far, he's no weirder than a nerd. He liked to take long walks in the country when he was a kid, a loner. AP Carter of the Carter Family took long walks in his boyhood, quit school because he was tired of being bullied as a nerd. Leo Tolstoy comes to mind reading this biography for the clarity of the writing and how the two authors bring characters to life in the telling. Every time I pick up the book, I fall right into it. This doesn't happen very often. It's almost like seeing it as a movie in my mind's eye. By age twenty or so I felt like I knew him, the person, felt like I understood what he was going through. He came from people who did their duty by church and by society, locked themselves into rigid roles. Little boy comes along, whose soul came from a very different experience, whose mind can't reconcile what school and church teach with how he was expected to act within very strict confines. He was born an independent thinker. Nineteenth Century Europe had no more regard for the independent thinker than USA today. He didn't get it, couldn't get it, couldn't fake it, couldn't lock on those chains. His story is that of an outsider. All he needed was understanding. As far as I can see, he never got it. William Blake was the same. He found his understanding in Kate. Van Gogh never found a Kate. 

vincent van gogh himself

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AN HONORABLE ROGUE

 

van gogh

A reminder came today that I do not always function by reason. I'm glad of it. The only person I know who lives as much by reason as possible talks like a robot. Always, everything he says is right, a matter of fact. The bland, non-emphatic voice that is always right. My reaction: Lord have mercy, may I go on flexing my emotional self, getting mad when it's the irrational thing to do, finding my joy feeding carrots to donkeys, doing nothing and feeling no guilt. In this time of the life I feel uncomfortable around men so clean shaven they look diseased and women so perfectly attired and coiffured they look like politicians' wives on tv. They strike me as people who bought the television package. On days the local arts group has their "gallery crawls" where people drive from one studio to another around the county to see the latest in crafty items, have wine and talk, the cars going down my road on their way to Allan and Gary's stained glass studio are all new cars. Every one that goes by, I think, Not anybody coming to see me. My friends all drive used cars and pickups. The only time used cars go by anymore is when a house is being built up the road, having renovations done or additions put on. A new car stops and parks beside the road. They're going to the waterfalls. A used car or pickup stops and parks by the road, it's somebody I know. My friend of years gone by walked into my mind, Lorne Campbell, lawyer. He was generally disliked by the town people and just as generally loved by the country people. A reflection of his attitudes toward town people and country people. Nobody from Whitetop Mountain, Virginia, ever paid in his office. They were the people he loved as his own.

vincent van gogh

 

Lorne is one of the people who has gone to the other side whose memory is always welcome. Since the moment I first met Tom Pruitt, my hillbilly sensei, teacher, I have studied mountain culture as closely as I now study donkey nature. I let people of the culture be my teachers by paying attention when they talked, thereby encouraging them. Over a period of five years, Lorne told me his life. It was the same as reading a biography, a sitting at a time, his memories told in more or less random order, like leaves falling from a tree, one at a time from different parts of the tree, every leaf an experience told. Not long after he left the body someone I know, who had taken Campbell on in a money deal and lost, spent over an hour telling me the sins and crimes of Lorne Campbell. He figured I only know Lorne's "good" side, like Campbell would only tell his past to me in self-serving ways. I laughed all the time, more within than without, because I knew every story he told. The best was that I could have told him some really bad shit that makes what he told like nothing, but I cannot disrespect my friend even when he's not here anymore. I did not even allude to knowing implicating stories about Campbell as a rogue. He liked having the name rogue. It gave him freedom. When he played poker, he played to win. He played golf to win, gambling on the golf course like at the poker table. When he did money wheeling-dealings, he played to win. He regarded life a game and played to win. Saying he played to win does not mean he was passionate about winning. It's the nature of gaming. A game is a competition. Somebody wins and that's what you play toward. He said court was the only place he was passionate about winning. Winning in court was what he did.

vincent van gogh

There was a time I entertained thought to write something about his life, but I don't want to disrespect his memory. I feel like what he told me, he told me. He didn't tell it on television. I was the one he chose at the end of his life to tell his life to. He was totally honest about himself. And what I told him of my life, in turn, was equally honest. I know he did not tell me "everything," but I didn't want to know everything. I have a rule of thumb for myself that I don't want to know anything about somebody that whoever it is doesn't tell me him or her self. Of course, I hear tales on people I know from time to time, but don't pay it any mind and don't want to hear it. It may not matter at all to me, but I'd still prefer to have heard it from the subject. I feel like people open to me when they trust me, trust me not to tell it around, not even to anybody. I feel it my responsibility to honor the trust. Trust is important in these hills. I made it a conscious point never to tell any of his dark side stories to anyone but my friend, Carole, whose trust is absolute. Two days before his spirit left the body, he said to me, "I've been looking at my life. It's been half good and half bad. I've forgiven everybody everything." My immediate thought was, he found his balance and signed off. Sayonara. Since the day he learned about Elvis dying sitting on the toilet, that was where he wanted to die. He got his wish. The nurse said, "That bowel movement was very important to him." I had to force a straight face and a funereal nod. I wanted to tell him so bad I got with him in spirit and told him. I don't mean anything psychic. I mean I focused my mind on his spirit and told him what happened. It either reached him or not. Doesn't matter. It was more for me than for him. He was more involved in the light he was rocketing into than the launch pad he left.

vincent van gogh

I met him in a time I was doing whatever-came-up, handy man jobs. A call from friend Lizabeth who sold mountain laurel with roots in dirt. Somebody had bought four and needed somebody to plant them. Much of the time I was digging the holes and putting the laurel in place, he sat on the deck reading. After awhile he called to me to take a break, sit in the shade, have some iced tea. He was reading Knut Hamsun's Hunger. Blew my mind. Somebody in Alleghany County reading Knut Hamsun? He was a Hamsun enthusiast without making literature of it. Just a writer he liked to read. Right away we identified each other readers. He read mostly presidential and political biographies, accounts of jail-breaks, stories of rogues. He turned me on to The Falcon and the Snowman. He knew by experience politicians were rogues. I asked him toward his later weeks if he had a guiding purpose along the way. He said he took up the practice of law to keep mountain boys out of prison. Mountain boys don't belong in prison. He said, "Our prison system is cruel and unusual punishment; therefore, unconstitutional. I can't change the system, but I can keep mountain boys out of prison." Everything else was little more to him than what you do to keep the office open. He was known all over Southwest Virginia as the lawyer who will hold your hand all the way to the prison door, meaning he will exhaust every possibility to keep you out, up to the very last second the door slams shut. I remember two guys he told me about in the prison at Bland, Virginia, wanting him to appeal their case. They got forty years for rape that was not rape. He said they went to him first and he quoted a price he'd do it for. They thought it too much and went to a lawyer who charged less. He could have got them a not-guilty; they got forty years. My head has so many good stories of people from Southwest Virginia, all different kinds of people. He taught me another level of understanding mountain people, a deeper appreciation.    

vincent van gogh himself

 

 

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