I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news
- John Muir
There is a sharp bend in the road and that’s where the camp is. Below the Miller’s cornfields as the land tumbles into the valley/ rolling down into itself/ there’s a creek, (like there always is), and that’s further on below the cabin. It’s a low spot in these timeless Appalachians.
I first went there as a teenager, but it has been years since I set foot in the place. The cabin itself belongs to a good friend who time has borrowed and not yet returned. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
There’s no blame, either way.
All these years, they’re just riptides.
Everyone slips under in the end.
____
A recent favorite of mine, the Irish writer, Blindboy Boatclub, once spoke on his podcast about solemnity. It was a game changer for me, teasing my attention towards something I’d never really considered before. Solemnity, he offered, is a way that others hold sway over us. Dressed up like a ceremony, solemn tones and words invoke a sense in us that seem to whisper in our ear.
You had better understand that this is heavier than the sky.
In the hands of the religious or the powerful: solemnity causes us to reflect deeply on the dizzying heights of gods and leaders. In the hands of the poets: solemn phrases reflect our own existence; in times of strife or challenge there is rarely comedy or tenderness from the lips of those we turn to for validation of our own raw humanity. Instead, those in the know utilize majestic air to frame their messages. Their words reek of grandiosity, their deliverances made lofty by the walls of solemnity that are simply never to be scaled
So how does a guy like me hold nostalgia in his hand/ feel it slathering warm blood all down my fingers/ cupping a deer heart out in the wintry forest/ and not let solemnity move in to hijack my words?
I am not at all sure. It can’t be easy.
_____
Time has moved on in a way that I think is a little less cruel than I originally imagined it might be like someday. Literature and songs about aging, watching people get old for real, it wasn’t lost on me that I’d get there at some point if I simply lived. Age is the prize for survival. It hardly seems fair on the surface of things, but that’s why we are here now, I guess.