He wants to live in a hick town. He wants the icy crisp sun to come up over some pristine mountain where you might catch trout with a shovel if you knew where to look. Enough of these spray-painted steel canyons. You can’t climb up the damn things. He wants a meadow, some crickets, maybe a flag flapping out in space. Maybe some cattle and dust plumes on the road from town. Maybe a pancake house, tack shack and bacon and eggs. He’ll even swallow his politics, or yours. He wants some peace for a change. It’s been a while.
His eyes are stenciled from so much time on the grid. Okay, technically anywhere the road may go is on the grid, but that will be our secret. He believes he can leave, and shut off the engine, even if wires seem to follow. A glowing screen followed him when he first ran off, when he pulled up to his great divide only to find it backlit by a lurching broadcast. He never imagined it could be like that, you know, out there, but if he had too much quiet on his hands he might need lurching shadows on strange ranges too. They drove him there. The farther out you go the further you look in. Cowboy poetry and the rock are intensely solo. The road always ends there, beneath a peak in a pile of rock. Only a few ex-prospectors and animals know the place. Poetry only sniffs at soft ferocity of mountain rain. He can picture it.
Recede into your mind's eye, if not into a screen. Limits may be found everywhere on the ground but you can be anywhere. You can watch burnt strata lay out, living rock, longsuffering atmosphere-- each strain, fold, rift and current a potential defining storm in deep calm. You can measure space, its measureless face against a road sign shredded by buckshot on glow, under blue and then sprinkled black, shattering quiet. "AUSTIN-- 149 MI"... Potential is a ribbon and peace reclines on a leaning sign ruined by a shotgun. Strata are fluid and motionless. Lulled by oceans' ageless advance and retreat, dark crush of sea floor and undetectable laying up of red rock treasure, we're never far from fire. Welded tuff came down as a fallen angel, molten and grotesque. You can see its serrated edge slip under dust devils, its terror only sensed.
Techno-flyover (sprawls again)
Techno-flyover (sprawls again)
Last edited by Nazz on April 21st, 2009, 10:40 pm, edited 7 times in total.
(record it!! 
)Thanks Arcadia, Cecil. This might end up as a tack-on. (Yeah I know, contain the sprawl). Haha. I wanted to write a chapter about how the desert "shrank" after I tested its limits on the ground while testing its limitless mind's-eye reach, and how that vision recedes back toward the mind's eye-- and then somehow make a parallel (reverse?) with the world and the world's limitless technological eye... Well that, and the ever popular "can't-hide-from-techno" arc, of course. Something like that.
Strata slip quietly into the desert generally, pyroclastic only when the land must be remade. Imagine flying over telephone poles snapping, armed only with blood, aluminum skin, and a white hot storm. Vague tensions between deep peace and fire reside in the strata. Last night through ruined floorboards he noticed he was perched on a lump of silica and iron hurtling through black, just beneath the screen. He prefers ruined motels for their whiskey shade and cracks in his inertia. He wrote poems in 1918 smoke clearings. He sees powerlines vanishing on the arc and he’s hung upside down by the knees on a transmission tower. See the whites of clouds before they shoot.
Cattle country drifts over luckless, blind deserts and narcotic seas of poverty and Frank up in lights, intensity of arid-pure light, wisdom drug taxed only by mind-altering heat and death by profit. Whatever happened to the mob? Hoo hoo, mourning doves are unseen in bullet-bound neon ruins. They bombed the Sands, took it down, buried it somewhere in that intensity. It's out of our hands, onscreen, fiftieth floor gleam and the money's spent. Tipping points multiply. Give us that old time religion. Our enemies are scheduled and we make our own shade.
How is a country mile long? You see them end to end plain as day unless dust is up. A city mile is long. Empires occupy mere blocks and crossing them takes years off your life, in steel canyons looking for the right storm without a sky. One wrong door could mean years. But he can't just run to the strata; he has obligations, and he may have drifted too far and his mountain is nearly gone, sunk into its slope under a storm of light. Nothing withstands that intensity. To his right are flickering lights, and to his left a feathery roundscape as vague as here appears from there, and he’s home. But if you said he was tired of that place he would listen. If you said let's go we would find a new road, be our own pain to the rhythm of wipers in a rare desert rain. We'd find some place new against the wind and make a life of it I’m sure.
Head out into your interior. Rise and fall keeps time. Find a thin etching stretching meekly into faint auburn, blanketed by thick silence. It slips out as a poem never repeated. Scrawl fades into burnished hillsides, brilliant or wistful in the angle of day. Imagine here from there in space-time fiction. What does now look like from then? How far can scrawl run out until it meets itself? How is a glance worth so many questions? Space energizes your simple dreamlike span. Its rhythm and scale blend inner and outer and converge on a big beat earth. You want to rush through lean times. You put your lead foot up against simple sublime, but your desert resists. Big beat earth is on its way to somewhere else.
Cattle country drifts over luckless, blind deserts and narcotic seas of poverty and Frank up in lights, intensity of arid-pure light, wisdom drug taxed only by mind-altering heat and death by profit. Whatever happened to the mob? Hoo hoo, mourning doves are unseen in bullet-bound neon ruins. They bombed the Sands, took it down, buried it somewhere in that intensity. It's out of our hands, onscreen, fiftieth floor gleam and the money's spent. Tipping points multiply. Give us that old time religion. Our enemies are scheduled and we make our own shade.
How is a country mile long? You see them end to end plain as day unless dust is up. A city mile is long. Empires occupy mere blocks and crossing them takes years off your life, in steel canyons looking for the right storm without a sky. One wrong door could mean years. But he can't just run to the strata; he has obligations, and he may have drifted too far and his mountain is nearly gone, sunk into its slope under a storm of light. Nothing withstands that intensity. To his right are flickering lights, and to his left a feathery roundscape as vague as here appears from there, and he’s home. But if you said he was tired of that place he would listen. If you said let's go we would find a new road, be our own pain to the rhythm of wipers in a rare desert rain. We'd find some place new against the wind and make a life of it I’m sure.
Head out into your interior. Rise and fall keeps time. Find a thin etching stretching meekly into faint auburn, blanketed by thick silence. It slips out as a poem never repeated. Scrawl fades into burnished hillsides, brilliant or wistful in the angle of day. Imagine here from there in space-time fiction. What does now look like from then? How far can scrawl run out until it meets itself? How is a glance worth so many questions? Space energizes your simple dreamlike span. Its rhythm and scale blend inner and outer and converge on a big beat earth. You want to rush through lean times. You put your lead foot up against simple sublime, but your desert resists. Big beat earth is on its way to somewhere else.
Last edited by Nazz on April 21st, 2009, 10:43 pm, edited 5 times in total.
Thanks Steve. Much appreciated.
Yejun, yeah I stitched together a spacy sort of "memoir" about my desert wander from a while back, now just about ready for publishing, and I think now I might add this chapter, which I've cobbled together from bits and pieces over the last few months. Thanks for reading and commenting. Appreciate it.
continuing............
Recede into your wander. In a glance his boundless realm was born, so perhaps it returns there in probing its reach and raising its dust. Rock and spirit merge. You don’t need hallucinogens, only a wandering eye. Ed Abbey dropped acid in Death Valley and his account reads something like metallic crackle-- a trip that subverted experience. A battle. In the realm, music and echo may drift in and out, or a little food and drink. Your eye drifts and delicate ridges turn deeper shades of quiet, your drug of choice. For now you are boundless, though it might evaporate when you get back to the road.
Or the road may find its own eye in a hundred-eight haze that outlived dust, a gentle pain. Pistons rumble and radio mumbles Dwight Yoakam like smoke and whiskey. The lay of the land has a single vanishing point if he could stop and trace it. Spent asphalt slips into a blinding flat that slips into a dark oak masterpiece. He can picture the bar—ornate, carved art, hauled a thousand miles over the desert from San Francisco in the gold rush. The prospecting is always good, though not as certain as blown sand and rubble and heat. Sound carries farther in dry heat and misjudges the wind. Shout the contours and scour the bluffs. Go down and pour a blue oak vision, carved out of cracked clay. For no good reason.
Wander comes naturally, inward as the outward seems to shrink. He heard a radio guy say there is a global depression and world war every eighty years or so, and then rattle off cycles of organized disaster like breathing, culled from meticulous notes. And it's endlessly replayed onscreen, unoriginal as hell, but it sells like hell if you win a big one along the way, and you might get to use the latest toys. We’ll get them with brother Techno, maybe smite evil from satellites or something, like revised revisionist Westerns in Reagan’s silver screen guise, the avuncular one. You must have faith, said he-- faith in inexhaustible star beams, faith in trajectory, momentum, gravity and freedom, though earth orbit is a curious phenomenon-- breathless freedom of space yet still on a tether.
Yejun, yeah I stitched together a spacy sort of "memoir" about my desert wander from a while back, now just about ready for publishing, and I think now I might add this chapter, which I've cobbled together from bits and pieces over the last few months. Thanks for reading and commenting. Appreciate it.
continuing............
Recede into your wander. In a glance his boundless realm was born, so perhaps it returns there in probing its reach and raising its dust. Rock and spirit merge. You don’t need hallucinogens, only a wandering eye. Ed Abbey dropped acid in Death Valley and his account reads something like metallic crackle-- a trip that subverted experience. A battle. In the realm, music and echo may drift in and out, or a little food and drink. Your eye drifts and delicate ridges turn deeper shades of quiet, your drug of choice. For now you are boundless, though it might evaporate when you get back to the road.
Or the road may find its own eye in a hundred-eight haze that outlived dust, a gentle pain. Pistons rumble and radio mumbles Dwight Yoakam like smoke and whiskey. The lay of the land has a single vanishing point if he could stop and trace it. Spent asphalt slips into a blinding flat that slips into a dark oak masterpiece. He can picture the bar—ornate, carved art, hauled a thousand miles over the desert from San Francisco in the gold rush. The prospecting is always good, though not as certain as blown sand and rubble and heat. Sound carries farther in dry heat and misjudges the wind. Shout the contours and scour the bluffs. Go down and pour a blue oak vision, carved out of cracked clay. For no good reason.
Wander comes naturally, inward as the outward seems to shrink. He heard a radio guy say there is a global depression and world war every eighty years or so, and then rattle off cycles of organized disaster like breathing, culled from meticulous notes. And it's endlessly replayed onscreen, unoriginal as hell, but it sells like hell if you win a big one along the way, and you might get to use the latest toys. We’ll get them with brother Techno, maybe smite evil from satellites or something, like revised revisionist Westerns in Reagan’s silver screen guise, the avuncular one. You must have faith, said he-- faith in inexhaustible star beams, faith in trajectory, momentum, gravity and freedom, though earth orbit is a curious phenomenon-- breathless freedom of space yet still on a tether.
Last edited by Nazz on April 21st, 2009, 10:48 pm, edited 5 times in total.
That satellite business is vaguely troubling; they take pictures. He sees gone deserts onscreen, the places he went not to be seen. He zooms to every mountain and corrugation, but they seemed more powerful when he didn’t know just how many occurred between here and there, when they were more than bumps bent southwest on a techno-jigsaw, another machine to escape. Maybe life was better as a machine in its sins of routine, when he just went about his business, when he didn’t ponder waste and extinction, or the volume of cancer dropped on people weary of being saved. Why run away? He had noble perception, like the others, and closed circuit teevee in a suburb like the others, so it seemed a wash, though techno may yet save us with its quick athleticism.
Techno also puts pressure on the rock. And you can’t just try to conquer and sell off everything. Yes, we are all instant gods and goddesses, but even they had to work things out at some point. No shame in it, really. So he stands on a drunken street corner, bedraggled preacher with a growl in his step, object of pity, preaching the end. He ignored the world but it would have none of that. Maybe it’s all the same advances and wars in accelerated loops, all cutting edge and dull. It’s a wonder our spirits haven’t overrun this place, so many lost to nonsense. He always distrusted Vegas for that but roamed the big beat earth outside and tested his echo. The big beat earth has an echo. He made peace with powerlines and thin towers crackling, and he may reinvent the blues, or subvert them like everyone else.
.
.
.
(okay, there. I think that's enough. likely more than enough.)
Techno also puts pressure on the rock. And you can’t just try to conquer and sell off everything. Yes, we are all instant gods and goddesses, but even they had to work things out at some point. No shame in it, really. So he stands on a drunken street corner, bedraggled preacher with a growl in his step, object of pity, preaching the end. He ignored the world but it would have none of that. Maybe it’s all the same advances and wars in accelerated loops, all cutting edge and dull. It’s a wonder our spirits haven’t overrun this place, so many lost to nonsense. He always distrusted Vegas for that but roamed the big beat earth outside and tested his echo. The big beat earth has an echo. He made peace with powerlines and thin towers crackling, and he may reinvent the blues, or subvert them like everyone else.
.
.
.
(okay, there. I think that's enough. likely more than enough.)
Last edited by Nazz on April 21st, 2009, 10:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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