Been away awhile. Tried to catch up on some reading. Mostly just tried to catch up. I think I am losing ground. I know there are others who feel this way: that the old, sacred things are fast becoming beyond our protection. Maybe they don't want our protection. Maybe we should just let them die. Have you heard about the
Homer Noble farm? It was once owned by Robert Frost. A group of bored, idle slackers who will never be heard from again trashed it.
"It seemed once that Robert Frost would be with us forever, like some
lichen-laced stone in a field. But finally he did die, in 1963 at the
age of 88, leaving biographers to quarrel about his merits as a man and
readers to marvel over his body of work, which, among other
achievements, twinned a mastery of language with wisdom about natural
things."
Aren't we part of the "natural things?" Shouldn't we piss, trash and burn? What other proof will remain?
We work to preserve beauty and ugliness. The Bill Steber photo above depicts a man filling the grave of Junior Kimbrough. In old blues recordings I hear the darkness, horror and exuberance of human life. Evil is going on. Love is going on. We work to preserve, but nothing gold can stay.
"Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
The leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day,
Nothing gold can stay."
When the power goes out we will have the graves of bluesmen to visit. When the lights go out we will have dimly lit pages of Frost to visit. We'll drag out guitars with Sitka tops and catgut, picks made of weathered shells. We will repair, we will not preserve. We cannot manufacture these dreams, cannot market them. Nothing gold can stay.
Comments (2)
The one thing that stays eternal in Blacksburg.....the age of the populace.
So much for the "golden days in the sunshine of (the) happy youth".
Here's where gold, silver, grass, persistence and love will always remain. In timeless words of poetry and pain.
"I will find out where she has gone,
and kiss her lips, and take her hands,
and walk along long dappled grass,
and pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun." - WB Yeats
If words like these are golden, the question is, do words themselves need preservation to stay? Does writing them down or speaking them over and over, passing them down, preserve their existence? Our voice, speech and writing all need to be protected. But the words...they are here to stay, solid and unguarded.
Welcome back.
Krisha