Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Note: written before I realized the extent of the Katrina catastrophe. I still don't fully grasp it. It may be awhile before I can write anything more.


8/26/05, Elko, Nevada:

I crossed the back side of purple mountain's majesty on a wheatfield wave, in devotion to my beloved golden hue, as the radio spilled details of the latest military base closures; the latest overdue bills from a 20th-Century orgy of the Militarized Manifesto, paid for in equal parts by fear, greed, taxes and blood, some parts more equal than others.

I appreciate those who gave their lives to protect the purple mountains. I owe them that much. There is a great deal to fight for, in the end. The radio droned on, like the engine; a long list of valuable resources at risk if the bases close. I resolved to seek the most inconspicuous land possible, far away from rich forests and diamond blue ports, for to possess them is to posses the marauders who will one day come over the wall.

I seek the land of least possible value, a land of wasted space, its only asset space itself, where inner and outer contrails of space cross over a smudged, bright slope. They won't bother to look for me there. I might catch my breath in that space, which resembles a contour of my hand at first sight, first light, reflected curve.

But fickle haze and distended geometry don't fool me as often as they used to. I could make out a fuzz of valuable timber stands over my wheatfield surf. For as big as this place seems, it may all be crossed with sufficient will, by encyclopedic armies, across oceans and quietly-beheld mountain ranges, like a death knell.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
8/29/05, Delta, Utah:

The Latter Day Saints have a conduit, so precisely wrought and confident. Every detail has been ordered and every precept so wonderfully black and white. They have a system. Utah's chaotic landscape should have cured the Saints of their preconceived notions of uniformity. Instead, it only gave them another hard metaphor for ordered truth carved out of chaos. The mission is named in the buttes.... "The Throne", or "Jacob's Chair", and such. Perhaps the buttes sealed it-- the verticality-- truth on top and ruinous non-belief at the bottom. One place or the other, with no middle ground. Like a black tie over a white missionary shirt, just passing through.

How can I take a vertical butte at face value? I imagine the view from two-thousand feet straight up, where the sheer walls and upended strata might appear more circular and resemble my idea of the quieter stretches of space. The shape of consciousness appears more rounded to me, like a cell which splits in two, or a planet in orbit, or a wide Mojave bowl basin. I don't process the vertical butte nearly as well. It reads too much like the smallest possible particle-- in or out, up or down. God is rumored to live in that neighborhood.

I may want to re-think heaven. I often accuse the faithful of "marking time" on earth, en route to future glory. But I sit here, beer in hand, and do the same. And they work harder than me. And they produce things. And I have no stated future payoff. Who has the better deal? While I suffer the confusion of this place, they till its soil for redemption. We both plan to make peace with the afterlife, but I lack the plan-- the black and white of it.

We hunt the smallest indivisible building blocks-- black, or white. But I prefer color.... catching a split-second of it when it breaks through, where a flash of it hits a crack in the veneer just right and imprints an image.... possibly an echo of hours of subconscious meditations. I might develop it, if I have the presence of mind.

Black is full saturation, a piling on of every color at once. White is empty starvation and promise; what a painter confronts with each new canvas. Between these poles flow the currents of life and creation. Even my computer screen originates from everything and nothing, from binary code, either a one or a zero, interpreted into patterns like pointilist art.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I received my blessed sacraments today.... chalky hills, suspended in heatwaves and billows of dust. The trail crossed a nether realm, nearly identical to a chalk sketch I made before I left, using three shades of light brown.

I thought of my roots. I thought of the rootsman, and his bedrock reggae rhythm, which issued from the dash. Reggae used to be an island of backward, color-splashed blues, rocksteady aquamarine. Until the rootsman arrived. He emerged from his deepest, dreadest chambers, his faith tested by a lifeless desert, a soft dub pulse to echo through canyons with ageless thunder. He rode the reverb stream with his message, out over the void, which gave its rapt attention. He was miles from anywhere.

the ceaseless compulsion of motion

it is better to journey than to arrive
a five hundred horse power diesel heart does not drone
it speaks the mystic syllable
you are better than Visine
your words eye drops for my eyes
the way you see the world
the way you find the words
when I first started driving I would hallucinate a lot
no drugs just highway hypnosis
but the road trained my eyes.
So many combat veteran truck drivers
I think the road is a refuge
Solitary existence
The solitude of serenity
I remember my roots
rootless and restless from the cradle
stranger in a strange land.

Very sturdy landscape writing in this one, mnaz, as well as metaphysical mumblings in the dark. Don't get me wrong; I love the mingling of god-searches and quick forays into sketches of heaven fused with your steady eye for the land.

To seek nothing, or emptiness, as fullness. That is a method to escape bloat, the bloat of ego and reducing the whole of creation to the crumbles in one's cereal bowl.

Last night, taking a walk in the warmish California darkness by the Pacific Ocean with my wife after Mexican food, we came across two boy Mormon missionaries unpacking their tracts, business cards and other evangelizing equipage from the trunk of their generic Plymouth, circa 1988.

The boys smiled at us and begged to leave us with some reading matter. That was odd since all four of us were in motion.

Theirs the motion of a mission, alliteratively considered.

We took a few turns through blocks of beach houses, around one with a frieze of glass bricks, three-storied, just sold for two million dollars.

As we passed the young missionaries I shouted, "House of David!"

My wife said I should never mock someone's religious ardor.

Actually, I merely alluded to something in my own past.

In 1957, when I was twelve years old, my parents moved me to Alaska. As we departed the frozen airport lounge, hardly more than a row of naval igloos in those days, in December, a group of sheet-clad pilgrims with long beards preceded us out into the snow.

They were all barefoot, four or five men and several women, and carrying heavy army backpacks ( this was, of course, the day before the junior-high kids and their feather-light "conformista" backpacks as standard equipment).

My mother asked who these strange people were.

"House of David" was the reply from a pot-bellied man sitting in a yellow plastic chair by the gate, smoking a cigarette.

( link)


http://www.israelitehouseofdavid.org/


Ten years later I read about the "Shiloh Messenger", and other oddities.

But opening the trunk on a new world and watching the godly whispers fly around in the frozen air was part of my airport introduction to Alaska, still relatively unspoiled in 1957.

I am reminded of the scene in that quintessential "sixties" movie by Bob Rafelson, "Five Easy Pieces" ( 1970),


http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/m ... v_id=17654

and the strident, shrill-voiced lesbian Jack Nicholson picks up on the road:

"We're headed for Alaska" she says," I saw a picture of it once. Very white everywhere. Not full of crap like down here. There's too much crap!" ( etc.)



--Z

mnaz - I read this after taking a much needed break from the New Orleans disaster (on many levels). It was a great respite from the ignore-ance of our leadership.

Another well-done piece, bud... makes me long for some isolation from so many things, the way I feel today - inept, lying governments, disaster prone areas (that want to rebuild!!), greed, terror, lack of equalities.. the list grows as I observe not only the Katrina attack, but the world situation. Is all of this the growing pains of Mother Earth that demands common sense and use of intelligence over our "7 deadly sins"..?

Lessons, lessons.. they never lessen but only grow bolder as we choose to ignore our intelligence over our self-created barriers of economics that inhibit all of us to bloom equally.

a quick thought -

take me to the desert
the place nobody wants
where the air is clean
and water for one
and there I'll connect with
nature and find my peace

"Our" two main problems...... We desire to accumulate far too many things, and we over-think the journey.....

.... trite, of course, but I'll stick with it.


Stilltrucking.... you nailed the compulsion perfectly. I've probably seen your rig, somewhere out there on the western interstates, and not even realized it.

Zlatko.... "metaphysical mumblings".... that's perfect!
It just fell onto the page.... not much editing..... Thanks for your great sketches and links.

mt.... When the hurricane first hit, the reports weren't that bad. The eye veered northeast of New Orleans, and the levees held.... at least for awhile. It was the day after when shock set in. I just cannot fathom an entire major city being devastated to that extent.

I also cannot fathom why adequate military assistance is only just now arriving along the Gulf coast, four full days after the storm.... perhaps the Bush Admin. was just as floored and confused as the rest of us.... I can't process the magnitude of this thing. It's just too much.

Thanks for all of your replies. I appreciate.

I've probably seen your rig, somewhere out there on the western interstates, and not even realized it.

maybe but probably not
Zero Hero
big red arrow down the side
always pointing towards home

I lost my home eight years ago
now I haunt the internet
closest thing I have found to being home
hammer down on studio eight.

I appologize for the different user name,
so bored with stilltrucking