I was just tryin' to paint a picture for you. But the canvas was cracked, the colors untrue

Untitled, Erwin, TN

Everything And Nothing
--Borges

THERE was no one in him; behind his face (which even through the bad paintings of those times resembles no other) and his words, which were copious, fantastic and stormy, there was only a bit of coldness, a dream dreamt by no one. At first he thought that all people were like him, but the astonishment of a friend to whom he had begun to speak of this emptiness showed him his error and made him feel always that an individual should not differ in outward appearance. Once he thought that in books he would find a cure for his ill and thus he learned the small Latin and less Greek a contemporary would speak of; later he considered that what he sought might well be found in an elemental rite of humanity, and let himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway one long June afternoon. At the age of twenty-odd years he went to London. Instinctively he had already become proficient in the habit of simulating that he was someone, so that others would not discover his condition as no one; in London he found the profession to which he was predestined, that of the actor, who on a stage plays at being another before a gathering of people who play at taking him for that other person. His histrionic tasks brought him a singular satisfaction, perhaps the first he had ever known; but once -the last verse had been acclaimed and the last dead man withdrawn from the stage, the hated flavour of unreality returned to him. He ceased to be Ferrex or Tamberlane and became no one again. Thus hounded, he took to imagining other heroes and other tragic fables. And so, while his flesh fulfilled its destiny as flesh in the taverns and brothels of London, the soul that inhabited him was Caesar, who disregards the augur's admonition, and Juliet. who abhors the lark, and Macbeth, who converses on the plain with the witches who are also Fates. No one has ever been so many men as this man who like the Egyptian Proteus could exhaust all the guises of reality. At times he would leave a confession hidden away in some corner of his work, certain that it would not be deciphered; Richard affirms that in his person he plays the part of many and Iago claims with curious words 'I am not what I am'. The fundamental identity of existing, dreaming and acting inspired famous passages of his.

For twenty years he persisted in that controlled hallucination, but one morning he was suddenly gripped by the tedium and the terror of being so many kings who die by the sword and so many suffering lovers who converge, diverge and melodiously expire. That very day he arranged to sell his theatre. Within.. a week he had returned to his native village, where he recovered the trees and rivers of his childhood and did not relate them to the others his muse had celebrated, illustrious with mythological allusions and Latin terms. He had to be 'someone: he was a retired impresario who had made his fortune and concerned himself with loans, lawsuits and petty usury. It was in this character that he dictated the arid will and testament known to us, from which he deliberately excluded all traces of pathos or literature. His friends from London would visit his retreat and for them he would take up again his role as poet.

History adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence of God and told Him: 'I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself.' The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: 'Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.'

She says, I'll talk to strangers if I want to, 'cause I'm a stranger here, too.

Drink Coca-Cola, Labor Day Gun Show and Flea-Market, Hillsville, VA

Listen to Chris Smither...then seek out Don't It Drag On and I'm a Stranger Here, Too

There will be no end soon

Labor Day Gun Show and Flea-Market, Hillsville, VA

Tear It Down
--Jack Gilbert

We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within that body.

Years and Years and Years Later
--Dan Albergotti

From this distance he can see that the man
is not Jack Gilbert. And he is not yet himself.
Being himself would not be better than being Gilbert.
Only Gilbert is more than Gilbert. Failure is better
than success in the same way that this poem
is still getting at something as it descends
into parody, elegy, and palimpsest at once.
We die and are put into the earth forever
is a line directly stolen from Gilbert’s “Tear It Down.”
Putting it in this poem means neither success
nor failure nor larceny. People need to read it
even if its magnitude of beauty is too difficult
for people. When I spoke with Jack on the telephone
to invite him to my university the next fall, he mostly
wanted to talk about my Italian name, to ask about
my poems. He wanted to know what I wanted
from poetry. I said I’d like to say something
to someone born two hundred years from now.
I think he approved, or I may have just heard
his enormously generous spirit smiling.
After his summer in Greece with Linda,
he could not remember ever having talked to me,
told my colleague who called to make travel arrangements
that he had never heard of our university.
Today the woman I love rejected my artificial soul.
What is it we want from poetry? When Jack Gilbert
and I have been put into the earth forever,
what will it mean if someone reads “Tear It Down” or
“Years and Years and Years Later”? Is there still time
to insist? Let my heart be feral, too wild for every
woman I love. This poem, Jack, is as helpless
as crushed birds, and still I say with you, nevertheless.

I've walked down life's lonely highways, hand-in-hand with myself

Untitled, Sylvatus, VA

Interesting video for Bonnie "Prince" Billy's "How About Thank You"

"Where you came from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it."--Hazel Motes in Wise Blood

It's been such a long time, we should grease up this watch of mine

Phone Cards, Raphine, VA

Can you deny there's nothing greater, nothing more than the travelling hands of time?

Time, Labor Day Gun Show and Flea Market, Hillsville, VA

John Darnielle (Mountain Goats) interviewed about his upcoming album, The Life of the World To Come. Every song on the album references a particular Bible verse. We've been reading Flannery O'Connor in my American Lit. class, and much of what Darnielle has to say dovetails nicely with O'Connor's stories of spiritual affliction.

Pitchfork: How does the sentiment of the chorus relate to the story of the verses?

JD: There's a number of different ways of feeling holy and connected with God. One way you can get really close to God is to sin as hard as you can. Because there's only one person, in theory, who can save you from that. His whole job, in a sense, is to absolve you of sin, to forgive you of sin. You're not supposed to, but you can test God by doing a lot of terrible things. If you directly intend to offend him, though, it would probably be the most direct, in a sense-- this is kind of Hare Krishna stuff, where they talk about the different ways you can stand with God. One is as a lover, but another is as His enemy. Because when you are engaging with someone in a position of enmity, that is also a very intimate relationship.

So these people are doing some bad things and one of them, the one who sins, is sort of experiencing a connection to God in the depths of his degradation-- which I think is almost a universal experience. When do you cry out to the God you don't believe in? When you hit bottom. That's the moment at which you are going to sort of know Him best. I don't even know, when I say Him, if I should put it in quotes or not, because I don't want to sound like I'm actually saying that. But I'm also saying that your ideas of God will come to rest upon you in your moment of profoundest degradation, which is kind of what that song is about.

Pitchfork: In the Bible, Genesis 3:23 is a verse about being cast out of the Garden of Eden. What you just described does not sound very much like a Garden of Eden.

JD: Well, everything's Edenic. Everything is. I really don't know what your past is like, but I've got to assume, like everyone else, you have plenty of pain in it, right? But when you go back to the places where the pain was at, you find that there was more stuff there, and that there's stuff about it that you miss just because it's you. Because that's who you were, and you grow to accept that. When you do that kind of stuff, whether it's Eden or not, it is. Every place that you left is Eden in some way.

I've been in fear of sounding portentous when talking about this record, but when you're starting with Biblical concepts, that can be a delicate balancing act. If you're trying to do heavy stuff, it' s hard not to come off portentous, but that might be how it comes out.

Here's Darnielle performing "Jeff Davis County Blues" at the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia

We drifted over the sea, where it hurts too much to look, it hurts to try and see

Vessel, Labor Day Gun Show and Flea Market, Hillsville, VA

2 by Andrei Codrescu

sea sickness

dancers strapped to canoes is
what the morning brings. they are tied
to a perpetual dance.
hooded folks in lighthouses
count on their fingers as the day
gets brighter, everywhere
dancing is either law
or crime. i have no particular
taste for this world. i am looking
for an utterly still completely
dead hotel.

about photography

I hate photographs,
those square paper Judases of the world,
the fakers of love’s image of all things.
They show you parents where the frogs of doom
are standing under the heavenly flour,
they picture grassy slopes
where the bugs of accident whirr twisted
in the flaws of the world.
It is weird,
this violence of particulars
against the unity of being.

Japanese Girl with Red Table
--Stephen Dobyns

The Japanese girl thinks she will die today.
In her mirror, she sees she is already dying
and she tries to compose her face into how
it will appear in death: forgiving, forgetful.
Between her white breasts, she already sees
the red mark of the knife—red as the red table
on the floor behind her, red as the red border
of the purple robe falling open around her
as she kneels before the mirror. Yes, she thinks,
she will destroy herself today; and her lover,
who has not come, will hear of it from people
crying to each other as he passes on the street
with his destination a solid object in his mind,
as real as the red table or the black and white
vase upon the table. He will hear that a girl
has been found with a knife in her breast,
but he won’t believe it’s she as he continues
toward the red table in his mind. Then at last
some friend will bring him the news, tell him
while he sits with his wife in the early evening,
eating sweets and drinking tea as he describes
the small business of his day. He will be holding
a porcelain cup with a picture of a single gull,
and he will listen to how a girl has been found
lying naked in her own blood on the golden rug
he gave her, while within him the words will be
eating his body as fire eats paper, as he tries
hopelessly to hold his cup steady and make no face.

I gave up on my sculpturing 'cause my life had gone all sad, an I went to work down at the factory, it weren't art but it weren't bad

Ben Franklin, Labor Day Gun Show and Flea Market, Hillsville, VA


Another song that provided company last winter: Hoyt Axton's "Snowblind Friend"

God ain't jive, for I can see his love as it runs alive one by one through fields of rusted wire

Have You Seen Me?, Big Walker Mountain, Virginia

I spent most of last winter holed up in a small trailer in Grayson County, drinking grean-tea or Virginia Gentleman and listening to Hoyt Axton and Mott the Hoople records I bought at an antique store in Mouth of Wilson. Here's one of the songs I listened to repeatedly.

tried to fight the creeping sense of dread with temporal things, most of the time I guess I felt alright

Brooklyn, New York

--a couple songs from the mountain goats' all hail west texas.

jeff davis county blues.

after three nights in jail, i head north from toyahvale,
switch to 285 in pecos, head up to red bluff.
my walk's real steady and my eyes are real cold
but i feel like i'm all of sixteen years old --
lost in the travel lodge, with the television on and the sound down,
i don't feel so tough.
old issues of sunset magazine to read,
sleep for twelve hours, and dream about home.

i have no place to go, so i drive up to new mexico.
fix my eyes in the rearview when i cross the state line.
and i panic, i guess. and although it's quite late,
i take the first exit to 128.
i am coming back to midlind.
i hope you won't mind.
polaroids of the two of us scattered on the passenger's seat.
i drive slowly
and evenly
and i dream about home.

distant stations.

i found an old rock in the dry dirt outside
the door of my motel room.
it was a triangle with soft rounded edges
and a split down the middle of one corner.
it was darker than english moss.
green like the soft frills of a peacock's plume.
i waited for you, but i never told you where i was.
it was you who taught me how to write these kinds of equations.
i waited on the steps for you,
and i hid in the bushes whenever a car pulled into the parking lot.
you taught me how to listen to these distant stations.
distant stations.

i saw the sky break.
i threw a rock at a crow who was playing in the mulch of some rose bushes by the motel office.
missed him by a good yard or two.
i sang old songs from nowhere.
los angeles.
albuquerque.
i said a small prayer for the poor and the naked and the hungry.
and i prayed real hard for you.
i waited for you, but i never told you where i was.
it was you who taught me how to write this kind of equation.
i waited on the steps for you,
and i hid in the bushes whenever a car pulled into the parking lot.
you taught me how to listen to these distant stations.
distant stations.