The seasons roll on. The color of the leaves changes and everyone gets excited about how pretty fall is. The season in which nature prepares for the death of winter is an acknowledgement of the coming end. But it is quite pretty. The calendar page must be turned to another month, and you still have no idea where you life has gone or where exactly it is going. Instead, you're just wrapped up inside of some Modernist novel and as the narrator struggles to understand the self you realize you have no idea who you are.
But perhaps that's a little forward, though I will admit that sometimes in the middle of an all-nighter I break down and forget who I am for a while. Beyond that my self is pretty evident. What I am more expressly talking about, or trying to scratch at is the intangible force -- that sense that we are here to do something and need to do it.
Hunter S. Thompson mentions something about flowing to the whims of "The Great Magnet." But what magnet is driving you, or me for that matter? Is it that crap the ends up showing up on your doorstep when you order the most random things possible over the internet in the middle of the night and forget about until the door bell rings? Or is that just more escape? Working hard all week and forgetting what we do on the weekends seems to be the method. Or, rather, it seems to be what we are all doing.
We plow through books and try to retain as much as possible. But won't the scope of our intelligence get worn thin after we settle down in some cubicle to a life of the mundane. Will we still be able to see fear in a hand full of dust when we are stuck in the back of some excel document and taking a break to edit the grammar of someone's business letter?
Frankly, I'm not so sure. But more importantly, get Virginia Woolf out of my life and get Jack Kerouac here immediately and tell him to bring plenty of tea with him! Not having the time to re-read great books like On The Road makes me wonder why exactly Kerouac isn't really taught. Most people have read Kerouac before, and if not, they have probably heard of him if they have any literary eye at all. It's just the good story of being with people and having a good time that I miss -- no more of this great quest into the polish guy's heart of darkness.
But what about that force? Most understand it as a muse. The best way my Memphian vocabulary can grasp the concept is to relate it to music. It's the blues. You either have the blues or you don't. Sure you can contract them, but it's commonly thought that in order to really play the blues, you have to live them. This goes much deeper than missing the bus and showing up late to class, it's an overwhelming feeling -- a presence in your life. Stevie Ray Vaughn lived the blues. At his lowest, he woke up in the morning and would sweeten his coffee with cocaine and whiskey, but when the doctor told him that he was going to die, he quit. He could still play the blues, and he still had them, but he cleaned up his act and that's when the helicopter crashed and he died. Life just reached out and bit him in the ass.
Hemingway had it too. He lived the greatest damn life imaginable: women, whiskey, bull fighting, fishing, flying, writing. But for some reason he was just never happy, so he killed himself. Virginia Woolf couldn't take the voices anymore and filled her pockets with rocks and walked into a river just like Faulkner's Quentin Compson. That was it.
It seems that the theme of loss and suicide could be a necessity of "having the blues" or being mused or whatever. But I don't want to kill myself now and I won't ever want to, so how and the hell can I relate to all that? Well, I can drink. I can socialize. I can write a column that 5 people will read in the middle of their chemistry lecture. Maybe I can just go fishing.
That is it. It's a glass of single malt on a cold day. It's getting an e-mail that ends "enjoy the fairy and best wishes from the world of absinthe." It's the Moorman's river. It's the dam at Sugar Hollow. It's driving up the bumpy road to get to the Rapidan. It's wading out into the middle of the stream and feeling the cold water rush past. Then it's not getting a single bite all day and not giving a damn about it.
Brett Meeks can be reached at meeks@cavalierdaily.com
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