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| Colorado National Monument |
I am in Grand Junction, spending most of my time here in the library at Colorado Mesa University. It's an excellent modern library, three stories with a multitude of tables replete with screens and keyboards. I guess I'm an old school sort. When I first entered the library, I looked around for books. I asked a librarian where the stacks were located. She smiled and told me the books were on the third floor. And so I ascended. The books - which, for me, are the heart of any library take up about a third of the floor space of the third floor. They are all on a movable shelving system that is compacted together. Captain's wheels, as if from a ship, are located on the end of each set of shelves to wheel them apart. Often you have to move a half a dozen shelves to open up the section you need. I spend most of my time in the section that contains PR 2848: the sonnets. Their collection is adequate for a small university. Still the collection, overall, is helpful as a reference resource. Since I have a professor's log on, I can print out article from any scholarly journal online. Soon, I imagine, the physical books will also be removed to make room for some new technology. All this being said, I am grateful to have access and a place to sit quietly, read and write.
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| Colorado National Monument |
I ran myself a ragged over the last month before arriving here. I am much much better now, feeling back to my "old self," if not in the process of encouraging a new beast of self to emerge from a strange womb. I think anyone striking out for distant lands and new territories - whether they be physical, psychological or spiritual - leaves the place he has been with a sense of having a door opened to a world of greater freedom. For myself, as you both well know, I left a world of great beauty and warmth, of a wonderful job, an inspirational group of friends to travel out into a world of smoke and fire, uncaring and inconsiderate strangers, with no security of where I might sleep from night to night, or no certainty of where I could find the hard and brutal sort of beauty that I was hungering for. Of course, this sort of difficulty was what I wanted. What I still want. But I wasn't entirely prepared for it.
Allow me to abuse and extend a metaphor here - hopefully not to the point of allegory - but my time in Bellingham seemed to me to be something of a prison. And I am fully aware that most people in the world would have been overjoyed to have exchanged places with me and live in the "prison" that I was in. It was a prison for me in the sense that I believed I did not have the freedom to be myself, this being a curious "blind spot" or personal weakness. As I expressed on several occasions, it was as if I slipped on the Scot Casey suit, zipped on the smile, and performed the role of Scot Casey on the stage that is Bellingham. And the part of myself that was underneath this persona, looking out from underneath the mask, developed a kind of resentment toward how I was living my life. This other part of myself felt as if he were in a sort or prison of self. I will quickly add that I think the character of Scot Casey is a pretty good role. I am comfortable and relatively happy being Scot Casey. In fact, the longer I am in the role, the more acutely I have to re-mind myself that this is not who I believe I truly am deep down underneath. Who I am deep down underneath... it is uncanny, as Freud would have it "strangely familiar," to be self-divided in such as way as to believe you are not who you are named and you are not the face you see reflected in the mirror. (Much of my obsession with the interior, shadow narrative of the sonnets is how they play with the idea of reflection and self, as Narcissus enchanted by the image in the water, or Dorian Gray gazing upon his portrait.)
I find it sadly amusing and too close to home that Sartre used the caricature of the waiter in the cafe to illustrate his notion of "bad faith":
I quote from Wikipedia as summary: "Sartre cites a café waiter, whose movements and conversation are a little too "waiter-esque". His voice oozes with an eagerness to please; he carries food rigidly and ostentatiously; "his movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid". His exaggerated behavior illustrates that he is play acting as a waiter, as an object in the world: an automaton whose essence is to be a waiter. But that he is obviously acting belies that he is aware that he is not (merely) a waiter, but is rather consciously deceiving himself."
Sartre goes on to say that the many who commit "bad faith" as a sort of "mental suicide" do so not so much because they are unable to find meaning in the world, but because freedom, the authentic freedom of being, is terrifying. In the face of such absolute freedom where everything is permitted, it is much easier ("bad faith") to follow an already established set of morals and/or codes of behavior than to invent your own. Yawn, existentialism, right? But nevertheless, eerie in how closely it approximated my mental state.
I left Bellingham in a kind of hungover daze of celebration for Scot Casey and well wishing, having just unburdened myself of most of worldly possessions and secured the understanding that I may not return for a long while. I unzipped (or thought I did) the Scot Casey suit and threw it in the passenger's seat to keep me company. I was out! The sudden freedom to go anywhere, to do anything, to be anyone was beautiful and terrifying in the cartoon Sartrian sense.
I felt like a dog that has been kept in a kennel for a long time and the door to the wide world is one day opened for him. He runs and runs in an ecstasy of freedom until he suddenly doesn't know where he is. Everything is new and strange. So, he finds his way back to the kennel and sleeps within his comfortable cage, ever cautious about his further ventures out. And I emphasize here with mystery and laughter: I placed myself in the cage. I was my own jailer. Goddamn me! Why did I do this to myself? Why did I willingly commit an act of bad faith? Why do any of us? Hinduism's Maya.
I am reminded of the Eliot lines from The Waste Land:
I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
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| Lassen Volcanic National Park |
I drove from the oceans around Arcata to the mountains of Northern California as an electrified convict escaped and on the run, hoping to ground myself upon their massive presence, to throw my self against them, step by step upward, willing to blow out my heart in the sheer effort to stand at an utmost point. But then, there surmounted, only to sigh that horrible sigh, and trudge down again in the mind of a suicidal Sisyphus. Beside the fire alone at night, I would pull out the Scot Casey suit as if it were one of my dead mother's coats, still heavy with her scent like a living thing, not putting it back on, but just burying my face in it for comfort. And I just felt detached. Alienated from my self. This dog returns to the kennel to find the door locked against him.
I went a little insane then. Can anyone go a
little insane? I traveled up the Pyramid Lake, which seemed a hellscape to me, a physical manifestation of the Great Absence. It was a bleak day with black clouds in the skies, sterile with no rain. There were few cars on the road and when I looked into them, they were filled with faces out of an Edvard Munch painting. I pulled into the parking lot at the marina, got out and the air was full of the desiccated odor of piles of corpses. There was no living thing around. The ground seemed ready to break through under my feet. The pyramid rocks I had hoped to see were far on the other side of the lake - or I imagined they were. I was filled with a vague sickness in my head. I just got back into the car and drove into Reno.
It was there I thought I might shock myself back into a world with meaning and hope. I took several doses of LSD. I should've known better. Famous last words to be found on my tombstone. But too late, I realized the cheap motel where I was staying was infested with drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes. In the chlorine blue light of the pool, all of their faces seemed leering and ghastly skulls. All of my doubts and fears manifested around me like St Anthony in a Hieronymus Bosch landscape. I made it back to the dubious security of my room to lay on a bed that reeked of desperation, sorrowful sex and cigarettes; laying there, eyes closed, sweating through one nightmare after another for 12 hours, contributing my part to bleak palimpsest of the bed. The next morning I turned on the TV and saw that Trump was due to be in Reno later that day. Somehow wretchedly poetic and a clear sign to leave town.
I traveled deeper and higher into the mountains, the High Sierra, to which King's Canyon is the gateway. I seemed a mad man to myself. I was some form of a daemonic entity going through the motions of being a sane human. Without being able to wear the Scot Casey suit, I was just a protoplasmic mass of amoral energy with just enough awareness to badly fake its way as another human being. The monstrous image in Dorian Gray's portrait stepping out of the canvas into this world, killing Dorian Gray, and then foolishly attempting to impersonate him.
Upon reflection, it's not cynical or even surprising to say that it is relatively easy for a monster to pass himself off as a human being in this sad fallen world we live in. People rarely look beyond themselves or see through the superficial projection they cast over the other. I hiked into the mountains only to find it populated with more people than I expected. Families, children, young couples. No other solitaries. I got as far away from others as I could, built no comforting fires at night, sat through the night haunted like the Ancient Mariner, gazing upon the stars which seemed only to be mocking me with their ghostly dead light. Perhaps, I thought, all the stars have gone out and all we are left with is this ghostly presence. Someday, maybe sooner than we thought, there would only be a blackness, an absolute darkness, in the heavens at night. And I could not distract myself from this way of thinking. That I was on a Death Trip became an
idée fixe , which would end sooner, much sooner, than I expected. The nights were long. I thought only of death. I couldn't sleep for more than an hour at a time. And so I hiked out and left for the deserts around Joshua Tree and the Salton Sea.
I found an old man. David, who hosted a traveler's refuge at his house. He lived between 29 Palms and Joshua Tree, down a dusty dirt road and around a few burned out homestead houses built in the middle of the last century, rusted bed springs and busted pot bellied stoves, broken spoked wheels and piles of bottles and cans, detritus of the American Dream. David would let you pay what you could to stay there. I think he could tell I was in deep waters. Told me no one else would be around for the next week. I was welcome to stay in one of the rooms. No AC, but a swamp cooler. It was 110 in the day. I took it, unloaded a few things to mark my bed in case anyone showed up. Headed up to the park.
It was in the strange prehistoric landscape, amidst the sparse forests of those surreal trees, that I first recovered / uncovered a sense of what might loosely be called my sanity. But I felt comfortable and human again, if not entirely myself. I walked far into the desert up there, until after the sun set and the first stars began to appear. Like hope, I thought. And laughed for the first time in weeks. A good joke.
Most days I was in Joshua Tree I woke up early and drove up to the Park before it got too hot. I tried to figure out what it was about the place that made me feel so much at home. Because it was so hot, there were not many other people around. In the early afternoons, I often saw no one for hours. One afternoon at the height of heat, around 108, I perversely hiked up to the Lost Horse Mine. Only a few miles, but as I walked through that High Desert world, it felt entirely the opposite of Pyramid Lake. And I looked at myself as a different person, who instead of being a passive alien and unwelcome presence in the world, was an active Pulse of Will. I felt graced and fortunate. There walking in the middle of nowhere, walking towards a Lost Mine, it was exactly where I had always wanted to be. In other words, when I imagined myself out in the world when I was in Bellingham - or even in younger days - it was as an old man walking along a path in a place exactly as I was now.
As I sat in the Joshua Tree Saloon that evening, I knew I needed to find a sanctuary where I could process what had been going on with me since I had left Bellingham. Not a tent in the mountains or the desert or a room in a cheap motel, but a small room near a good library or a university. I wanted to be silent and surrounded by books. I remembered my friend who taught at CMU in Grand Junction and sent her a text. Within the hour, she had found me a tiny garage apartment for a great price and offered full use the library.
Before I headed to Grand Junction, I ventured down south the the Salton Sea. On a day that was nearly 118 degrees. I drove to Salvation Mountain where the intense heat made my phone turn off after 10 minutes of photos. Then I wandered over the make shift community of Slab City, where I had once considered stopping for a while and staking a claim. I wasn't there long. Long enough to again recognize the lost and desperate, burned-out face of America, the bloodshot glazed-over eyes of trivial avarice and broken, shattered to dust, dreams. The toothless smiles and gravelly cheap cigarette tainted voices full of pathetic little white lies.
As I drove back to Joshua Tree, a bit of the previous weeks' insanity crept back into me. Even though it was late, I drove up to the park and sat in the jeep, windows open, the engine ticking, reconciling my visions of all of these sublime trees having died off in the next 100 years - which they will - with the sweet and simple fact of their presence now. The next day, I drove out of California into Utah. And then straight across that surreal state to Colorado. I could come back to Utah.
Once I got settled here in Grand Junction, I established a set of daily rituals. Therapy. Not just going through the motions, but a discipline with which to move onwards, to build a new monster self.
I found a good deal at a local gym, where I go first thing after I wake up. Then, I come here to the library, write for a few hours. Then walk around campus doing memory work. Back the the library. Back to the room, where I read until I go to sleep. After a week of this, I feel, unsurprisingly, like a new man. Or maybe an older man. But I realize, with much greater clarity, where I am going and, more importantly, who I am now and who I want to become. Thanks to all the dead gods haunting the sky! I hasten to add: I haven't found any great answer and don't even consider the last few weeks to be an extraordinary experience. When I think back on where I've just been, it's all a great foolishness in my mind, an unfortunate waste of valuable time.
I remind myself of one of Blake's proverbs of hell: a fool who persists in his folly will become wise. And then I also remind myself that I am way too old to be engaging in the profoundly foolish behavior that I recently persisted in. I imagine myself as an idiot Ulysses who is retracing his journey from Troy to Ithaca, not with his crew, but entirely alone. Forgetting Circe's advice regarding the Sirens, he does not bind himself to the mast. Hearing the Siren's song, realizing he is in dire straights, he rows his boat along a madman's meridian, insane from the singing desire for death ringing in his skull. At a point of utter exhaustion, he finds himself thankfully in the midst of the relative safety of Scylla and Charybdis.
It has been the un-covery of these simple rituals of body, mind and soul that have saved me, bound me to the mast, and continues to provide clarity and meaning, passage through, this insane nightmare of a world. Ha ha. Another good one.
I will be here in Grand Junction for another week, working to make some headway on my funhouse mirrors analysis of the Sonnets and some other creative work. Then I will be in Santa Fe, hopefully to house-sit for a month through October. After that, I'll most likely head north to the Monastery of Christ in the Desert and the Chama River Canyon.
