I drove and I smoked. I chased golden splashes of autumnal light. I took deep slurps of java. Occasionally I fired up a cigar, zipping down a forgotten country road, wondering what would happen if I left everything behind me. If I discarded the worthless putt-putt I was steering behind an abandoned Silo in a small town. If I hopped a train headed west, everything I needed stored inside my fingertips; stored inside the wild contours of my heart, the picture of my beloved crinkled inside the folds of my wallet.
I mused over Buddhist adages--how the Dhamapada insists that the further one travels the less one knows. How my mentor Mark-Andrew had a tatoo of the phrase, "He who does not know where he is going, will go furthest," eteched into his flesh.
I clung to these adages like a life vest as I traveled into the open pastures and harvested meadow land christening the majority of my state. I then laughed out loud, thinking of mock X-rated adages we had memorized over lunch trays in junior high.
Confucious says: It is good to meet girl in park, but better to park meat in girl.
"Life," I thought, pumping my elbow as I reeled down the drivers' side window and yelled out into the thick cool flaps of Novemeber wind, "How serious can you take it?"
I had no itinerary, no destination, no port. The gravel swerves and tortuous sways of the road shepherded each subtle tilt of the steering wheel. I passed through towns with population less than three hundred. A water tower and a Casey's General seemed to be the social hub for the entire county.
I was lost, yet I had never felt so sure of where I was going.
I've always secretly despised individuals who could make it from point A to point B with such ease and facility. Despised them then, anyway. I abhorred my siblings for escaping the genital wart of P-town; hated them for accomplishing something with their parental approving artistic medium. I hated peers who could attend college classes without having to work full time. Hated them until I read the introduction to William Gaddis' RECOGNITIONS where author William Gass posits that art, like life doesn't obey the linear trek from point A to point B--It's more like you're on the Eisenhower in Chicago during rush hour and you've missed your exit. You can hear the clamoring din of gridlock surrounding you. You've already gone through a pack of cigarttes and you're trying to shovel through the glove compartment to locate a map--to find out just where you are. The cell phone is ringing off the hook; whizzing an annoying tune your ex-girlfriend programed because the theme song from DAWSON CREEK gives her romantic nostalgia. A grandmother driving a Mercedes behind you is giving you the finger and just as you locate where you think you are headed on the map--you realize that you are holding the map upside down, and then you realize that it's not even the map of your own state--it's not even a map of your damn country--it's a map of Canada and all this time you THOUGHT you knew where you were headed, you really had no fucking clue.....Yeah, Gass asserts, life is like this, and thank God.
I continued to drive, the faster I drove the more time seemed to melt into a button of past experiences that no longer seemed to mattered. I thought about lovers, about poetry, about the concept of an aged, dottard God whose meaning seemed to differ from continent and tongue yet whose message remained constant. I thought about the borders of language; about universality of physics-- the cosmological tilt of the planet; our solar address, the aquatic bulb of planet earth, heavily turning its countenance of riddled land rashes into the solar lens of a nuclear hearth 93 million miles away.
Throughout his inspiring creative-surging lecture series Joseph Campbell notes the spiritual importance of a "Sacred Place"--a place of "spiritual incubation" a palce where you are free to be completely yourself--a place where you can let the long tresses of your hair stream freely from your skull.
I've dubbed my sacred places, with respect, by the moniker"vagina"--a place of pyschological rebirth; that golden November afternoon I landed in one of my vaginas--and I emerged different, changed, reborn.
Someday I plan on writing an autobiographical account entitled "Matthiessen Grace" about my sojourns to Matthiessen state Park, located near Ottawa, Illinois. It is my vagina--my creative womb; a place where I can let my untethered soul soar naked amongst the thick stalks of wild trees.
Everytime I leave Matthiessen Park something changes. I come home changed. I come home to new lovers; new employment--one time, to the sudden death of my father.
The park is arrayed in wildlife vectors--a huge waterfall coasting through the center of a park--hollow dells; a dented geological souvenir of the last Ice Age that somehow escaped us.
Over the years I've promenaded under icy waterfalls, skipped across hidden paths, bathed naked with hippies in the nearby Vermillion river, smoked weed with with peripatetic gypsies, felt at peace with the earth.
That Novemeber afternoon seven years ago, I ended up in Matthiessen State Park, about two hours north of Peoria. I was all alone. I escorted my heavy thoughts beneath the vacant garments of skeletel trees limbs. It was autumn, rich with hard-candy leaves; bouquets of lavender and orange flames raked across the pasture in a tidal wave of leafy foam.
Deer brushed throughout the park that day. I counted more than fifteen brown blurs cantering from the corner of my eye. I sat in front of the lower dells, watching water gush and flow from the bottom of the falls. I was all alone, my heart bleeding down my chest, into my stomach, feeling, for the first time, full.
I left that the park that night late; the indigo eye-liner sky gently sealed its lids into darkness, I drove home. I removed the photograph of Megan and instead thought about my co-worker, Jana; the girl I flirted with incessantly at work. I drove home, still smoking, still skiing through speed limits, but I drove home and returned to that place I had I had left ten hours earlier, that palce that I seemed to be coming back to after all this time.
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