1 Life is a Dream Already Ended I remember

Life is a Dream Already Ended
I remember, remembering, that mad activity sent from the
nectarine of Proustian dreams, that on so many hot and dry and silted
days in the summers without rain when I’d be standing like a sad
desperate child waiting for a lift on the edge of the black top
rolling small pebbles underneath my worn shoes.
Life is a dream already ended-Jack Kerouac
It seems an eternity that I’ve been on the roadside, the actionless
sidelines of my own life, in childish wonder of where the road, that
long pulsating vein of destiny, will take me. I think this condition
all the time, “what the fuck am I still here for? This place is filled
with ghosts condemned and tormented at dead ends of life.” This place
I’ve been calling, home, has never been a home, I’m a stranger, a
wayfarer in his own cradle.
The situation is that this is not home and home for me is
something of an unknown quality. It’s always been out there in the
distances of the earth’s grand enchanting arced horizon. The mystery
ensues.
I drifted on a river I could not control
No longer guided by the bargemen’s ropes
They were captured by howling Indians
Who nailed them naked to colored stakes
I’ve been on this metaphorical trip of wild blazing adventure for many
years now and because of this manuscript of my life is always being
born. So what if I’m in Nowheresville, USA, I used to think. But all
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those dreams, all those memories, of a voice unheard is torment for
any writer. What, am I going to be another lead character edited into
James Joyce’s, THE DEAD? The allure of the unknown shore constantly
calling me out this page I’ve been stuck on is what is the true
determination of the visiting the funeral rites of the past.
Those not busy being born
Are those who are busy dying
- Bob Dylan
This particular Taoist phrasing of what the substance of
existence is was always poignant and encapsulating of the entire
perspective for anyone who continues to seek meaning out of life.
If
life is not consistently an experience of renewal, you might as well
join the droves of towering dead. And I’m sure that anyone can relate
to any of these sentiments in at least some part of their life when
the spark is combusting or a mere ember. These strands of thought are
completely bound in the concept of time and more particularly the
past.
To feeble minds like my own, time is something that I’ve never
trusted as a natural or healthy method of relating to ourselves or the
universe that we are bound to, but to make the leap and live outside
of time means that your custom of interacting with the world would
have to be revolutionized and communicated in never before implemented
terms. You would not look at this life as a beginning or an end but an
eternal process of being. And what of the time-mind? Time insists on
the process of becoming, of gradual movement to another of multiple
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ends. What if it were possible to become not in the process, but in an
instant be molted of all the distortion, fear, envy, hate, conflict,
and contempt? That would have to require an unconditional freedom of
which I have not developed yet.
How much will your past determine what your future will be? Some
morphine addicted mother from A Long Days Journey Into Night made a
point of connecting the past with all future and present events that
were inescapable. I believe in freedom though, and I believe at every
moment one shape an entire destiny and at the next shapes another
truth. The past is only as valuable in as much as you can learn from
it under the basic premises of time and, quite frankly, I’ve learned
all I can learn from the tired philosophies of this dead horse town
that is going nowhere. The road and her mountains call my name.
I have a friend who threw a dart at a map of the world. It landed
in Delhi, New York, not a bad method, but what a rectum of a place to
end up in after traveling the world and seeing all those tales of
original love. The people I hung out with in high school were the
really smart ones. They left this Appalachian disease and never
thought twice, never looked back.
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone
- Bob Dylan
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The funny part is I’ve always been in a situation where I have nothing
to lose, which is a blessing, what keeps me here in this place
contained with people trying to recreate the grand ole opre or trying
to bring back the days of “I Like IKE.” Where does a poet fit in to
the spectrum of tormented puritans and blind steel workers? Ideally,
diversity should be a cohesive sensibility; I really don’t have a
problem with difference, but whenever I hit the pavement or am out in
the open, you see these eyes of enmity.
I attract glares in rural America of “What the hell you doin’
here?” I think Hunter was on to something that is in the core of this
deal. “Fear and loathing” was what he coined after Kennedy was shot.
As I understand it what people don’t understand they equally loath and
fear. This is the place of the Scottsboro boys. Natchez burned here.
It’s only a matter of time before they come knockin’ on my door
especially with that Patriot Act that was snoozed into the
constitution. The bill of rights might as well be toilet paper.
When I look at this situation, what I always have hovering is
some angelic messenger in a whisper “walk this way my son.” Because I
never fit the mold, I subsequently had never felt that I ever truly
lived in this town. Independently living my own course and direction,
solitude is a blessing as well as being the fundamental human
condition. Prayers to Shiva sent my way a condition of never being
consumed by social milieus.
So, hitting that road until there is no more road is the most
reasonable decision I can make. I’ll never change these people,
they’ve been this way since the 1700’s and nor should I seek to
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impress any control over another human that is only the fruit of
aggression and fear. Their roads are familiar and reasonable to them
just as that beat convertible is to me, tires licking dashed lines, is
to me a truth and the only way to find anything I could call home.
Humanity was better off as nomadic drifters always passing
through picking berries and having no time in one single place to get
fucked up, the downfall was agriculture and cities and populations. So
there I see myself listening to the song of the locust, degree in
hand, headed directly into a Louis and Clark expedition into the
wildernesses of Mexico and the Americas. This is my individual take on
our situation as humans, affected by wanderlust perhaps, but I have
found the journey as a part of the personal narrative and all the
transformations that have occurred within that narrative all seemed to
be focused in an obscure place with very little actually happening
other than the decay all around me. In this uneventful past, oceans
have been crossed; I’ve visited and been a pupil of gurus along the
Ganges, and ultimately discovered some answers to my questions about
life. It is that I do not see my journey ending here in such austere
social conditions, there must be a species of man who can look past
differences and see humanness in me that is equally possessed in them.
A kind of an anthropological quest I speak of, but one worth taking.
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