Song of the Open Road: The American Machine

For the wanderer doesn't bring back from the mountainside
to the valley a handful of earth, unsayable to everyone, but
rather a word gained, a pure word.
-Rilke
The Ninth Elegy

10-20-98 Columbus OH: Much different than other shows I have done here. More people than usual and a much better venue.

Ohio is flat and the people are trapped on the flat plains. The endless small towns, full of American flags and bad food. All that time and television. You want the real America? It is here that you will find it. Ohio, Michigan, these are the places where the American slow death plays itself out over the seasons. Football and raking leaves. All that heritage. Depressed towns that are now shells of the boomtowns they once tried to be. No one told them it was a joke and the joke was on them; that the American Dream is only for a few, that the rest just serve their time in this tortured land of beautiful fugitives. Small towns are suppliers to the American Machine. Soldier boys, food, patriotic air, good sturdy racism and separatist spirit.
-Henry Rollins
Smile, You're Travelling

You said: "I'll go to another country, to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I've spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed
them totally."

You won't find a new country, won't find another shore.
This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,
will turn gray in these same houses.
You will always end up in this city. Don't hope for things
elsewhere:
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you've wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere else in the world.

-C.P. Cavafy

The City

Young French would-be punk-rock stars

listening to American westerns on the juke

trying to figure out

how to get out of town

-Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Sometimes I think of Paris not as a city but as a home. Enclosed, curtained, sheltered, intimate. The sound of rain outside the window, the spirit and the body turned towards intimacy, to friendships and loves. One more enclosed and intimate day of friendship and love, an alcove. Paris intimate like a room. Everything designed for intimacy. Five to seven was the magic hour of the lovers’ rendezvous. Here it is the cocktail hour.

New York is the very opposite of Paris. People’s last concern is with intimacy. No attention is given to friendship and its development. Nothing is done to soften the harshness of life itself. There is much talk about the ‘world,’ about millions, groups, but no warmth between human beings. They persecute subjectivity, which is a sense of inner life; an individual’s concern with growth and self-development is frowned upon.

-Anais Nin

The Diary of Anais Nin 

I want the city

but I want the country too.

-Jonathan Richman

City Vs. Country

Long having wander'd since, round the earth having wander'd,

Now I face home again, very pleas'd and joyous,

(But where is what I started for so long ago?

And why is it yet unfound?)

-Walt Whitman

Facing West from California's Shores

"This shit's all fake. As long as you remember that when you come out here. It's all movies. Everybody's an actor. The money's real but everything else is fake."

-Dude on balcony in Hollywood on his cell phone

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la sainte terre" — to the holy land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a sainte-terrer", a saunterer — a holy-lander. They who never go to the holy land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds, but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all, but the Saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which indeed is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this holy land from the hands of the Infidels.

****

What is it, what is it,
But a direction out there,
And the bare possibility
Of going somewhere?

****

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only, — when fences shall be multiplied, and man traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road; and walking over the surface of God’s earth, shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities then before the evil days come.
-Henry David Thoreau

Walking

Richard Lee calculated that a Bushman child will be carried a distance of 4900 miles before he begins to walk on his own. Since, during this rhythmic phase, he will be forever naming the contents of his territory, it is impossible he will not become a poet.

-Bruce Chatwin

The Songlines


Where you been is good and gone
All you keep's the getting there

The Peach blossom follows the water

-Li Po