Howdy, Pilgrims.
My life has certainly gotten the better of my art in the last weeks, so there’s not much to show, but I do have a bit to tell, some themes to worry, writing in my sleep, unsettled dreams.
One of the things on my mind is reunion, familiarity (familial) as opposed to strangeness, strangers. And travel can present both. The lineal descendants of my parents, sons and spouses and children by blood or marriage and even one great grandchild gathered on our farm in southern Appalachia, headwaters of the Chattooga, to celebrate my parent’s 60th anniversary. Kids came from all over. She and I crossed the great Missouri-Mississippi watershed from the western divide, visible from the deck, to the eastern, on the farm, which I thought was kind of cool. We had us a time, even though though nobody had a Desert Eagle, much less an old B.A.R.
Leaving, we kissed our grandbaby goodbye, and detoured up the Blue Ridge and over the Smokies to see my great aunt, my paternal grandmother’s youngest sister and still with us at 99 1/2. Children and the very old deservedly count half years as accomplishments. Five generations in being on a single day, not something you often see.
And with that, we headed back back westward, out onto the Southern Plains.
* * *
The trip had been unsuccessful. Nothing dramatic, will fight again another day, but for now we’re coming home. Spinning across Oklahoma, it’s hot on the edge of dangerous. My brother just sent me pictures from a fjord, somewhere north of Bergen, you already know how it is beautiful. I prefer something a little more exotic, adventurous.
The crack in the windshield has grown, and now reaches from a point high and a few inches to the left of the rearview mirror almost all the way across to the right side A pillar. I think about a windshield shattering at 87 miles an hour, our faces full of glass. Goodnight Gracie. I tried to have the windshield fixed back in Houston, queasy wet hot, falling down hot – when I was much younger and stronger I nonetheless got heat exhaustion during a race and ran straight into a telephone pole, knocking myself out. The Safelite guy, a kid in a floppy hat, meets me at the edge of a hospital parking lot, and soon enough we got my car’s hood up, under a shade tree like we were on some farm, the service van parked alongside, every door open. Maybe it is the heat that makes everything look like the aftermath of a wreck or some other calamity. I bring drinks to the kid in his floppy hat, it is too hot for humans out here, and by then he’s discovered that “they” (?) did not load the van with the rubber seal that holds the windshield. Sir, I have the right glass, but there’s no seal, and I’m trying to get my manager to get me a seal, I’m really sorry, but I don’t think I can use the old seal, so we’ll have to reschedule, I’m really sorry, sir, Monday at the earliest.
I can’t wait. Can I drive the car? I have almost a thousand miles to go tomorrow.
Oh yes, sir, that’s just cosmetic.
It won’t shatter?
No sir, it won’t shatter. It won’t come in on you. I’m really sorry, sir.
Come in, I think. Are you sure? I say. Yes, sir.
I tip him for trying, he doesn’t want to take it, but we petty nobles have our obligations, too.
Have a blessed day,” he says, which I take to mean that he really believes we will be o.k. You too, I say. Good kid. Via con Dios indeed.
I’m more worried about the air conditioning. It’s a fantastic car, but designed in Germany, and they’re still learning about heat. If the AC is run on high, say because it is over 100 degrees, much more on the road, the pipes sometimes freeze, and cool air stops flowing into the cabin. There is something wrong about freezing up in the heat, it’s like drowning in a desert slot canyon. Be that as it may, in direct sun on a hot day, the little black car with a large greenhouse becomes an oven in a couple of minutes. If this happens, BMW advises running the heater until the flow of hot air melts the ice. Last year a German couple got lost looking for an art exhibit somewhere near Marfa when their AC froze up. They appear to have read the owner’s manual, and, being Germans, followed the instructions. The driver passed out at the wheel and drove into a small canyon. By the time the wreck was found, the couple were dried out like jerky, mummified in their seating position. Rather than fish out the car, break the bodies to fit into coffins, and generally go to a lot of trouble, the Texans buried them as they were, just bulldozed a few yards of fill over the car. Lost in the desert. Just kidding. About the Germans, that is, not about the air conditioner.
Not wanting to become jerky, we are keeping the AC running by using it as little as we can stand, and I’m sweating. The persistent variable pain persists, fortunately at the low end of its variance. Besides, other people have real problems. Hell, I probably have worse problems, too, that I don’t want to know about, that’s our situation today, isn’t it, haunted by suspicions that systems are losing their integrity, are not to be trusted, cancer in the guts, in the gonads, in the breasts, in the body politic, problems hidden until they aren’t, and then what are you going to do? Suck it up, buttercup, and drive, drive like the world is on fire. Blah, blah.
As one does, I stop for fried pies. This place is not much to look at, just a couple of buildings, shade for some tables, like that matters. Hot wind blowing out of the south, and you can see for miles. I was here years ago. The pies are delicious, like I remember.
Fried pies always make me think of a man I’ll call Earl. His family struck oil on their farm. It happens. I don’t rightly know how rich Earl was, and I’m not sure he did, either. Maybe he was a billionaire, back when that meant something, maybe not, it doesn’t really matter. But it wasn’t some sort of internet market capitalization accounting rich – it was oil in the ground rich. Somewhere in the vastness of Texas, I was told, a small town is named for Earl’s family, and maybe that is true but I never visited it. What I do know is that our rehearsal dinner was on one of his ranches, lush green East Texas grass glowing in the dusk, English furniture, Asian art.
Earl was a big man, with a great love of all those unhealthy things that Texans eat. Once, he was late coming to dinner. When he eventually arrived, Earl apologized, saying he had to stop for fried pies. As one does. It made perfect sense.
A woman of a certain age is running the shop. I select my pies; a fresh pot of coffee is brewed. I also buy some cheese, asking if it is local. I’m told it is Amish. Better than local, I guess. A teenaged girl appears with the food and rings up our purchases, and abruptly I realize her skin is perfect, her face is angelic – she is quietly, disturbingly, beautiful. She’s certainly local, maybe she is Amish, anyway modestly dressed, which may be why I did not really see her at first.
I’m an American, so my first thought is that she ought to be a model, she ought to be “discovered,” go to Hollywood. That does happen, too, or has, but my response saddens me. Why should beauty be converted into coin? Overly harshly, maybe, McCarthy said something like because you are Americans you thought the answers to your questions could be found in a brothel. I’m not going to look it up, it’s the memory that counts for thinking. Another age would have attempted art, and we should, too.
I’ve had this experience just a few times; I can recall maybe a half-dozen occasions. Weirdly, an Amish ice cream vendor in Belize (the Amish brought a great deal of dairy expertise to Belize) made a similar impression. This experience is not recognition of “the most beautiful,” whatever that might mean. Nor is the experience erotic in any practical sense – while a kid in a store rang up our purchases, I chatted with a woman who may have been her mother, and with my wife. Nor is this experience “love at first sight,” though that might be a common mistake.
Sometimes, a person’s beauty is unexpected, unsignaled, and appreciated abruptly. You are reaching for your coffee and you suddenly realize she could be a model. Being surprised by beauty doesn’t happen very often, as I’ve already noted. Most people are alert to what attracts them; they see it coming.
I think it has to be erotic beauty, desired, and so one generally anticipates, isn’t that what desire is? Though I am what I am, Mann and Cavafy and more simply, the figure of the handsome stranger convince me that what counts is desire, i.e., it’s not gender or orientation specific.
On those occasions when one is surprised by beauty, however, one feels somehow ungrounded. The beautiful person is encountered as an apparition, like a ghost, or an angel. Apparitions are strangers, by definition, to be “discovered,” new. Apparitions are not entirely here, bespeaking elsewhere, which is perhaps why one is more likely to see them while traveling.
In contrast, those we love and know are human, here, present, often achingly so.
By the same token, the apparition’s specific beauty cannot be represented. You cannot photograph a ghost. Art will fail, because in doing the work, the moment will pass, the ghost will become a human.
It’s worth trying, anyway.
* * *
I am in an audio mood, and should do some recording, but my sound gear is in the mountains. I rarely “curate,” a fancy word for “link,” but I didn’t get anything finished in the last few weeks. Here are a few things that seem on point, and maybe worth your listening.
Points of Departure. Chapter 1 of my book Smith Lake, about road trips, memories, going back home even if the family is long gone (non reunion?) and the difficulty of writing much less thinking. And the South. The books is evidently unpublishable, but it may be the best thing I’ve done. My very first podcast.
Choctaw Bingo. James McMurtry’s song about the “north Texas southern Oklahoma crystal methamphetamine Industry,” the reunion of a sprawling family, most n better than they outta be, as my grandmother used to say, and the country we’re driving through. Brilliantly allusive, someday maybe I’ll write up the notes, like Joyce or something. A masterpiece.
Doc Brown Sings. A celebrated surgeon sings the American songbook for his patients and others. You cannot make this stuff up.
* * *
Realism had become earnest, expected, even in its bathetic violence, both boring and abusing the reader, and too much work still is. Writers needed, still need, magical realism. But it’s not just about literature: magical realism teaches us to see the magic in the real, not just a train full of bodies or art aficionados buried in a desert canyon, but fried pies, handed over by an angel before you head back out into the heat.
Enjoy the rest of your summer.
— David A. Westbrook