I grew up in the company of men and women who on holidays got together and drank beer from long-neck bottles, told stories, sat around playing the guitar and singing. Days like this Independence Day were not spent milling in large crowds listening to predictably packaged speeches touting the official culture’s platitudes of a non-existent form of democracy. My folks got together with their friends and sang rock-a-billy, blues, and country. They often would drive for hours just to be with each other. They sang songs that portrayed their experience, and they celebrated that experience on holidays, together.
These were good times in the decades after World War II, and the memories of those times came flooding back to me today as I was listening to a recording of Jorma Kaukonen singing Merle Travis’ Reenlistment Blues. I can remember my father brightening up almost every time they would sing Reenlistment Blues [and someone usually eventually did sing it]. Dad would always explain to me that Travis sang that song more than once in the 1953 Film, From Here to Eternity.” Travis not only sang the song in the film, in a way the whole film was structured around that song as an expression of the brutal fabric of army life, the idleness, violence, inertia, but also the intense camaraderie and friendship experienced by working class men in the military, as depicted in James Jones’ novel by the same name.
Many times as a young boy I was allowed to sit in gatherings like the ones in the film. The stories would go round, my father, mother, uncles and aunts, extended family and friends all sat in an irregular circle, and sang and talked — in peoples’ homes, hotels and motels, backyards, after hours in bars and restaurants. And it would go on for hours, and often, as the day and night progressed, they were ringed by a forest of long-necks that defined some sacred post-war space. It was a rich communal experience and it did a wonderful job of making me impervious to most forms of packaged experience to this day. Nothing much measures up to these kinds of moments, to these ways of being together with people.
March 2009: Waking up in Elko, Nevada, over 5000 feet in high basin and range country. Riding I-80, formally an old fur trappers’s route; formally an early rail route to the Pacific; formally, I am sure, a Native American trace learned from the migrating herds, angling through the illimitable expanses of high desert.
I-80 West, Spring 09 - Donohue Photo
Our trip yesterday started in Price, Utah on the Colorado Plateau, then up over the Wasatch Mountains through explosive light and snow of Soldier Pass, down into the Great Basin of Utah, picking up I-80 near Salt Lake City, and then cruising, endlessly, and arrow-like, through the Great Salt Lake basin — water and salt and minerals laying on the table-flat expanses, industrial salt operations and mounds of snow white salt in the distance off the Interstate.
At Wendover Nevada the road rises into these basin and range landscapes and we rise into a kind of awed wakefulness and calm silence, the gathering sense of moving through deep time. These landscapes are architectures of deep time; and we are time travelers, getting into Elko just before twilight. Elko an old Basque Cowboy town, railhead and now a trucker’s and rancher’s center buzzing with casinos and travelers. In deep time everyone’s face is familiar, lined with detail and specificity – we are all travelers here.
Knowing where the journey begins is always a tough call. Where did it begin for this journey?
Breaking the Galilean Spell — “Not everything that happens in the universe is governed by natural law”
Complex systems and multiple leveled organizations result in properties, behaviors and spontaneous order that can not be explained by the individual parts or levels of the system: “Hearts are emergent”, unforeseen and unpredictable.
Stuart Kauffman reinvents the sacred: “live forward into mystery”
Spring dragonfire and moonfire
Cold air and blazing light.
Wandering 21st century poet-bureaucrats
Huddle under a gibbous moon
With their cheap wine,
Dreaming April crocuses .
Kenneth Rexroth: from The Lights in the Skies are Stars, A Sword in a Cloud of Light
“…Believe in Orion. Believe
In the night, the moon, the crowded
Earth. Believe in Christmas and
Birthdays and Easter Rabbits.
Believe in all those fugitive
Compounds of nature, all doomed
To waste away and go out.
Always be true to these things.
They are all there is. Never
Give up this savage religion
For the blood-drenched civilized
Abstractions of the rascals
Who live by killing you and me….”
