A packet arrived from Casey in Brooklyn yesterday and inside was a copy of his new and totally cool compilation album "Memory Against Forgetting" and a copy of the new book "The Rose and the Briar ~ Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad". Thanks Case!
This morning when I was standing at the train station somewhere between awake and asleep wondering which direction I was going to go, I had a cool dream. I was a small kid again and helping dig a hole at the old farm where I used to live. Right there in the tall bleaching grass and dead bracken fern we had started digging and now the opening was quite large and deep. Turned out we were digging out an older hole where farm animal shit was dumped and covered up again. There was an old fellow in work denim and thick framed glasses, standing on the edge of the hole who would look in, point and say "Now that's donkey shit there". He was super old. He was from another time. We uncovered new composting layers still rather fresh, green, and smelly. It was a hot day under long summer blue. As we dug deeper we began finding bits of things other than shit - bits of cardboard that form the cushion between layers in old fruit boxes - and old records. Records. Thick, tattered 78's all covered with shit and crusty clumps of dirt. We excavated them and looked them over. Somehow the dream shifts and I'm in a cafe of some sort and down a narrow hall someone in a lab coat is running a clear solution of a sort over the old albums and then using some mad computer program to "map" 3D images of the grooves so the computer will "read" them and replicate the sounds so we can figure out what the songs are. The computer image of the songs looks like some undersea sonar map of canyon walls. We travel down the digital canyon in real time. Each ledge and indentation representing a fragment of sound and, traveling farther, creating notes and strings of notes and old, lost songs return to life from their quiet years of gestating. Alive again from where they had laid dormant but never dead under the ground and buried in shit.
It's a surreal soundscape. Like the smokey copper kettle illustrations of R.Crumb's blues heros. Trains from the neatherworld, and mules that howl like dinosaurs. Barns that burn down. Billowing fog banks - portals for steam locomotives that come crashing out of nowhere. They make unscheduled stops at stations full of ghosts. No one speaks. Time is the scratchy, static noise of a dull needle on old vinyl. The gentle rhymic dusty noise before the next song begins, or, is it, after the one before has ended? This scratchy silence is time existing between two other times. Neither here nor there. Songs come from this silent in between place and disappear back into it. People get off at the wrong station, or wander too far downstream, and never come back again. Ghost passengers wait forever on the platform of Nowhere Station. They drown in bogs, burn up in barns, girls throw themselves down wells and drown, spinsters pine away and succumb to fever. Rivers flood, or dry up in the heat. Songs are stories in the lost luggage room of Nowhere Station. In the corner are the lost battered antique suitcases with discolored, and fading name tags. If you read the tag you will see the owner's name written in careful, flowing pencil but no one's ever heard of them.
My worlds split right down the middle of my head. I have two right brains up there. One in Europe. The other in America. Immigrant ships sail reluctant thoughts across ocean-sized synapses in between. Whereas right brain Europe is all trains, right brain America is only tracks. Never any trains. Europe is the poetry of arriving and leaving. America is the song of empty track. The lonely destination in between where you're going and where you've been. I walk along the tracks and the muddy thickets and the river deltas out where the rails have ended. America is the scratchy song about tracks, thrushes, blazing hot days filled with split rail fence lines and rose bushes. A little rain fell in the morning. Someone never made it home last night. Someone else came home drunk. Someone - a lover who would never tell - met his end on the gallows. Someone got a bullet in the head. A father followed the roads looking for his wayward son. Stars shone and dew settled in across the landscape. A ghost wandered away across the field still trying to make it home from some some long away battlefield. Troubled sleepers moan quietly. They sweat through the night when only stars can see. The cities seem far away and there isn't any sound out here. Maybe someone is still up drinking. He's singing the second verse of "Peg and Awl" just to himself. It's eighteen-and-two according to that system of time. In eighteen-and-four the song ends and the world fades into the warm quiet quilt of gentle scratches and pops. It's the time-in-between time of night, or is it morning? A single moonlit rail line running east and west. One direction into night, the other into dawn. No train. Nothing moves. No noise 'sept the sound of your own breathing as you decide which way to go.
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