Song of the Open Road - Extracts 2

And never so much as today have I found myself
With all the road ahead of me, alone.
-Cesar Vallejo

I praise what is truly alive,
What longs to be burned to death.
-Goethe

And this is the reward: that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome, to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord! Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.
-Emerson

It is the lumps and trials
That tell us whether we shall be known
And whether our fate can be exemplary, like a star.
All the rest is waiting
For a letter that never arrives,
Day after day, the exasperation
Until finally you have ripped it open not knowing what it is,
The two envelope halves lying on a plate.
The message was wise, and seemingly
Dictated a long time ago.
-John Ashbery

I am pursuing you, life, to the ends of the earth
-Frederick Seidel

Mr Henry: It's an esoteric journey. We're renegades from despair.
-Bottle Rocket

The ancient British Bards had for the title of their order, 'Those who are free throughout the world.'
-Emerson

The spread of materialistic values has contributed to a moral coarsening and a growing cynicism in our country. Within a manipulative world all motives seem venal, all efforts illusory. But at a deeper level, it is the commodifying of imagination itself, the moral passivity, the social isolation, the angst that is generated by living in a solipsistic world of fraudulent satisfactions that is producing the greatest evil.
-Larry Harvey

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven
-Wordsworth

When geometric diagrams and digits
Are no longer the keys to living things,
When people who go about singing or kissing
Know deeper things than the great scholars,
When society is returned once more
To unimprisoned life, and to the universe,
And when light and darkness mate
Once more and make something entirely transparent,
And people see in poems and fairy tales
The true history of the world,
Then our entire twisted nature will turn
And run when a single secret word is spoken.
-Novalis

We waste our life waiting, and I haven't the faintest idea
How to act or talk... in the lean years who needs poets?
But poets as you say are like the holy disciple of the Wild One
Who used to stroll over the fields through the whole divine night.
-Holderlin

You must not cling to your boyhood any longer--
It is time you were a man
-The Odyssey

ANDRE: Well, you know, I could imagine a life, Wally, in which each day would become an incredible monumental creative task. And we're not necessarily up to it. I mean, if you felt like walking out on the person you live with, you'd walk out. Then if you felt like it, you'd come back, but meanwhile the other person would have reacted to your walking out. It would be a life of such feeling. I mean, what was amazing in the workshops I led was how quickly people seem to fall into enthusiasm, celebration, joy, wonder, abandon, wildness, tenderness! Could we stand to live like that?

WALLY: Yeah, I think it's that moment of contact with another person. I mean that's what scares us. I mean, that moment of being face to face with another person. I mean, now, you wouldn't think it would be so frightening. It's strange that we find it so frightening.

ANDRE: Well, it isn't that strange. I mean, first of all, there are some pretty good reasons for being frightened. I mean, you know, a human being is a complex and dangerous creature. I mean, really if you start living each moment, Christ, that's quite a challenge! I mean, if you really reach out, and you're really in touch with the other person? Well, that really is something to strive for, I think; I really do.

WALLY: Yeah, it's just so pathetic if one doesn't do that.

ANDRE: Of course there's a problem, because the closer you come, I think, to another human being, the more completely mysterious and unreachable that person becomes. I mean, you know, you have to reach out and you have to go back and forth with them, and you have to relate, and yet you're relating to a ghost or something. I don't know, because we're ghosts, we're phantoms. Who are we?
-My Dinner With Andre