Gone Boy

(Members of my family, no idea when it was taken, or exactly who they are now, comments on back unreadable, impenetrable---as is the space let in the middle of the stairs, a missing punctum, inviting....someone to sit down there. Now all in Cedar Lawn or equivalent, maybe with added wings, a plague of saints.)

...

"Lately, I have been very aware that I have a past. Not only because I have reached an age when the greater part of the journey has been traveled, but also because I now know fragments of my childhood that until recently were off-limits to me. I can now distinguish the various stages of my life with sufficient clarity— the autonomy of the parts and their relation to the whole— which I was previously unable to do. I have begun to remember with respect and emotion not only my youth but that of others because of the innocence it represents— its blindness, intransigence, and destiny. That alone allows me to conceive of an infinite, unknown, and promising future."

Sergio Pitol, the Art of Flight, by way of SG Hickman's blog, Alien Ecologies

 All of which, or part of which could be true. Personally, the idea of a clean slate, an innocence as it were, doesn't strike me as feasible but a wan hope. It seems to me that it is the crack between the worlds, as Carlos Castenada once put it, that is generative, between the Back Then, which we can under no account get to and the Now which we can never really get out of either. There in that split is where the ghosts, haints and saints live. To want to have nothing to do with that split is the wrestling match which 'being modern' entails, it's the reason my parents got out of here, this county, this town, when they did, a forced march into the future. or at least one version of the future (The visceral impact of which is the umbilical cord of the child). Yes, a dream of innocence in a way, getting out of the quagmire dead end, the comfort (and the disquiet underneath that comfort, inhabiting it from the bottom up, from the real life punctum of Cedar Lawn).

Perhaps innocemce, in its blindness and infinitude, inhabits everything but is covered over with the rabbinic idea of endtime of world redemption: everything is the same with the exception of one small thing. I can't remember the exact quote...from Walter Benjamin, have to look up. Maybe the creation of a new world takes only small displacements. Maybe new worlds of innocence are popping up around us, within us,  faster than we can count and faster than we can see. Maybe even faster than we can remember. Is that a false infinity of a true infinity?

(satellite view of farm, middle of shot, bounded by yellow, red indicates path of bypass)
 

"… [Boris] is a weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness."

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Boris must have lived in Mississippi in the summer time at some point, i.e., the heat and humidity can no doubt cause one to think the Apocalypse has come; temperatures taking a steady heading into the mid nineties and above and god only knows how high the humdity is. Suffice it to say, it feels like a blast furnace hooked up to a water hose. I can't really say I remember it being this hot/humid but the weather channel assures me that this is indeed a record hot year in MS. Perhaps its the devil getting his bellows ready for the countdown to meltdown. There are enough churches in town to assure me that might be the case, I forget also that one of the first questions/suggestions/statements when you first meet someone is : Oh where do you go to church. I would like to say that church is the place for that timelessness in the Miller quote above, a Sacred Opening ready for ...Whatever. But if anything , it is the pulling of one's geneaology though the present-day eye of the needle into a hoped-for reunion of one's relatives (and hence one's self)... the community of those who have everything in common. Yes, very different from the pomo "community of those who have nothing in common" but merely exist in the same sheer diaphanous sphere, untouching of those in proximity.

The placement of the cemetary in the middle of time here, indeed seems like an Omphalos, a transtemporal gyre twisting Then past, now Here, and to come, Then again, in the future. Albeit tacked more loosely to the land than previous generations.

Meanwhile (the Geo always exists as a meanwhile, biding its time, since it holds all the card ) the heat baking us all into a casserole for the Neshoba County Fair coming up this week.

More later on Fairs, heat, Kairos, and onward---or backward--or around and around ...

Please note, ladies and gentlemen: 'One would like to be a Medusa's head' to...seize the natural as the natural by means of art!
   One would like to, by the way, not I would.'

This means going beyond what is human, stepping into a realm which is turned toward teh human but uncanny--the realm where the monkey, the automatons and with them...oh, art, too, seems to be at home."   Paul Celan, The Meridian

Heading West

Heading due West  out of Atlanta on interstate 20, past Birmingham, then past Tuscaloosa the four lane stretches and throws off all giant billboards, commercial signs, and forsakes most exits.  There are several exits that throw the driver into pure country roads, where GPS can pause in confusion for a bit (Take exit 40 and wind slowly though nowhere, few houses, many trees).  Burn straight though to Meridian  (unlike Atlanta which announced itelf by congestion 50 miles outside the city prope) a gign says Meridian, you crop the hill and well, there it is Meridian, hometown of the legendary singing brakeman Jimmie Rogers and most recently actress Sela Ward, and not to forget Weidman’s a 100 year old restaurant, where we had one of the best meals in recent memory. Oddly enough Meridian was also featured in the opening scenes in the first Fantastic Four movie, home to a yet to be recruited mutant. I know the feeling. A town with population somewhere around forty fire thousand when he would visit it as kid. He thought it a raging metropolitan area. It’s also the title of a prose piece by Paul Celan which is neither here nor there but you may encounter snippets from it as we go along. If for no other reason than it is one of my favorite essays.

Turning off of interstate 20 you take state route 19 all the way to Philadelphia for some 35 miles or so. Coming out of Meridian, you stay on 4 lane before it gets serious and chugs down to two lanes. Not too long ago it was all two lane, dribbling out of Meridian and then drilling straight though gothic southern forests, past abandoned ESSO gas stations. Small clapboard houses, and Kudzu (should be the official plant of MS, not the Magnolia. Brought in as a foraging crop for cattle and erosion control in the thirties, it, like another Mississippi crop, the blues, found its true home and began to conquer the world in earnest. And of course much earlier there was cotton. I guess they all fit together.)

A few miles before you enter Philly on 19 is a non-descript dirt road. Down aways was the burial site of Michael Schwerner, James Earl Chaney, and Andrew Goodman in an earthen dam, three kids killed by racist bigots during Freedom Summer in MS in 1964. (The story is well told elsewhere; only recently has there been some closure of the case). Suffice it to say that it was a kindling sort of environment, brutal, incendiary, the feeling everywhere (so hard to describe now, textures spoken as well as unspoken were ringing chords all over) that Something Big was happening or at least on the way. Revolution and a feeling of fatefulness and watchful expectation was everywhere. Politics was in turmoil (the brutality of the Chicago Democratic Convention was coming). Assassinations were the order of the day. A man on the moon was due coming up, riots seemed to be everywhere, the psychedelic revolution was underway, Timothy Leary meeting with the Black Panthers, a feeling of the arrival of a cosmic conscious was ubiquitous.  During that same period, 1963 to be precise, his cousin Ricky, four years his senior, Nineteen years old, living in the Delta with his parents, was murdered on a frog gigging expedition in swamp area outside of Oxford MS. His companion was shot and mutilated, Ricky was shot in the head. Nothing was ever discovered (or told anyway) about what happened. The FBI came down to investigate and left just as promptly as they came, having come to no conclusion. It  remains a mystery down to this day. One newspaper reporter called it ‘the dirty deltasecret’.

Grandparents died or were killed in auto accidents. It began to feel like a slaughterhouse down here. The general and the specific turmoils seemed to collide in a very close everyday manner. My father would never tell folks where we were from. In 1961 the Bennie and Martha Cheatham family got the hell out of Dodge, but still coming back at every opportunity, holidays and funerals alike.

Things seemed to be exploding and imploding simultaneously everywhere.

Second Start: The Infinite Torque

( The land has a geo logic which we seldom encounter directly but which imprints us from birth, a labyrinthine twist which often seems to be embodied only much later. The twisting but flattened gyre of the Mississippi River has been a spine for millennia affecting a genea-logic. Is the deformed iron grate reforming or deforming? Coming or going back to its urform?)

 (Still trying to kick this blog to life...there will be a third start.)

 

“You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

― Thomas Wolfe

The idea that we can never go home again must be one of the most quoted in all of literature, especially when thinking about all the allied ideas around melancholia, homesickness and so on.  But with all due regard to the acuteness of Thomas Wolfe’s observation, it also seems simultaneously true, and in a sense just as real as the enumeration above, that we can never really leave home either. (I mean, when it comes right down to it isn’t that Kant’s legacy?)  The idea of being modern has always had as it’s kernal the idea of ‘leave-taking’ and of subsequent rootlessness, and that the forced march of history away from the savannahs and grass lands of humanity’s birth places is all for the good leasing in some way, an uncanny way 'forward': Progress!!. Doesn’t it feel right to say that the more gone we feel, the more progressive we must be? To even raise concerns about the rightness of such is to set off cultural alarums and klaxons.  From those of us in the West, all we do is gaze in wonderment as the sheer number of (forced) migrations now taking place around the world. But, I would contend, that pain of movement is of the very essence of being modern.

Oh, ok I suspect you were expecting more personal testimonies of / about the Cheathams, Robert, Sloane and Rowan, move back to Mississippi. Well, that is coming but you know me, I can’t do anything without massaging it thought-wise. That must also be part of my personal dealing with home (and Home).

It would be foolish to say that I don’t have a certain amount of trepidation with the move. Given Mississippi’s reputation as the last on all scales, I have had to re-organize my organum regarding the Great and Sovereign State of Mississippi.

BOOKS

“Every passion  borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before me are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?”

Walter Benjamin – Unpacking My Library

I feel a sort of necessary paralysis in packing my library. I feel as if I am undergoing an archeological excavation. A few of these books, tattered and/or yellowed pages, I have kept from childhood. A yellowed but intact copy from 1962 of my first copy of the science fiction magazine Analog, circa 1962. A largely intact paperback of the early space program and its possibilities; I even remember the drugstore in MS where I bought it as a kid.  A falling-apart paperback by Arthur C. Clarke on incredible things that may await us in the future. At the time I was more or less completely enthralled by the ecstatic spaces of science fiction, the future was so bright I had to wear shades, as the song went.

Walter Benjamin’s essay dealt as much, or more, with the collector rather than the collection. I never had any idea of building a collection then or even, really, much later. In fact many of my books never made it though the travails of time and its disruptions. Several of Nietzsche’s way-beyond-tattered books of essays—most recently Beyond Good and Evil—failed to make the passage. But even undergoing the process of triage, I find it very difficult to let books go. I still regret letting my collection of science fiction novels go. It comprised an entire four by eight foot bookshelf. I’m still not entirely sure where they all went. Truly, I have no clear idea of what happened to them all.

And of course, folks move around so much now, the baggage of extensive collections (or assemblages) of books is the last thing people want to lug around on their current nomadism.

I’m not entirely happy with the idea of being a collector. In such a case the idea of a collection begins to take up more of the mental space than those items that compose it. And there is also no end to collecting once you embark on such. Disturbing I guess in that it seems to say completeness doesn’t exist as long as there is (always) one more piece of the puzzle to gather, one more datum to make a dossier (of evidence? Of what then??!).

Benjamin again: “The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the thrill of acquisition passes over them.” And I have to say that it is true for me that only when I have a copy of a book and have lived with it for a while do I feel like I in any way ‘know’ it. Yes, I guess a little bit of totemism leavened with fetishism there.

And although I never really thought I was collecting books. I WAS a collector of record albums and had something like 2500 of them. But, symptomatically perhaps, they are all gone, sold off bit by bit in a previous life. And besides they were as heavy as hell to haul around.

And neither book nor record now has any resale value other than to a collector and only under certain circumstances of limited edition, first edition, etc. Digitality has destroyed the middle man in one way and opened it up in another, though the ability to sell via Amazon, etc.

           

At any rate, a functioning library has always been a part of the concept home.

 

where am I ? Who am I ?!

(picture of my father's old Ford, parked on Deemer Road, at gate to old Taylor farm, now flattened into time past)

"Bubba shot the jukebox...
    (played a sad song, made me cry)"

Memory, as reckless, and/or sad as it may be, is the only time machine we have. The South is about nothing if not those two things as well as a melancholic redemption from both of them when necessary.  Some of our friends in Atlanta reacted in disbelief when informed of our decision to move to Mississippi for a while. The notoriety of its recklessness (at least in memory) far exceeds the reality of the here and now. And while the rest of the country seems to rocketing into the future with inceasing speed (for better or worsr), the hamlets of Mississippi seem to content to cope with where they are in the best way they can...even allowing a little grass growing beneath the feet.

So I guess there will be a little grass growing underneath this blog also . (and those who know me can be relieved--or disappointed as the case may be--that there will not be much in the way of French poststructuralism or German phenomenology...though it might take a theological turn now and again. You wouldn't begrudge me that would you....after all we're in Mississippi for God's sake?! (It still seems to be as 'Christ saturated' as the saying went a while back. It's also reflected in Faulkner's observation that "Chirstianity is just there, whether I believe or don't believe", seeming to echo Walter Benjamin's words: "'My thinking is connected to theology like the ink-blotter to ink. ... But if it were up to the blotter, nothing that has been written would remain" ) I remember vividly my grandfather pouring over the bible in the living room here---and sneaking a peak at American Bandstand on the old TV in the corner of he room. As you can tell already there will perhaps be more sepia-toned elegiac here than gazing into the void of the contemporary. It's easier to see for one thing. And too, Sloane will be blogging on  a variety of things Mississippian, having taken to the state in a big way.