Vignettes:02172014

Vignettes:02172014

Was a labor of love among friends, Wednesday open-mic night. The sharp glow of Wired-Up Coffeehouse at the Butterfield Strip Shopping Center at Butterfield Hill along the old Butterfield Trail.

The consensus master of the mike and amp, one of us.  From the swampy depths far south of here, to coffeehouse legend;  at least in Fayetteville and Tahlequah, his favorite haunts:  Fayetteville Wednesday; Tahlequah Thursday.  Was a life lived with words, letters, friends who lived for language and for live performances.  The moment captured by memory, these eyes and ears remember; for the love of the small crowds gathered each week during the school terms;  spent his days preparing his rhymes.

Tap the mike, hear it, feel the amp bite back.  The rhythm of his composition, the dim limelight brightened each night he took the stage.  The adventure, the violence of his outdoor life, brought to the strip mall stage, a night with the Lord of the Dimmest Limelight, never a candidate to tour the coffeehouses of North America.  Home was down yonder, far away, a world away, as far as he could remember.  This stage was enough.

Escaped from sturdy structures, gathered round the campfire on a weekend of biking national forest trails. Some with tents, others sleeping under the stars near the flames.  A screech, a near miss; nearly stepped on the creature, a smaller remnant of the Titanic age reptiles roaming the earth disappearing in yore.  An unfortunate rattlesnake offering up for sacrifice under the moon and stars by the flickering campfire. A shovel, the sound of metal striking rock and hard-soiled earth,  the job complete. Head severed, fangs no longer attached to a body, dinner plans have changed.

Giant Lodge Dutch oven, covered with a prepared crust, a top crust and filling in reserve,  awaiting the skewered chickens to brown for chicken pot pie now to be accompanied by the latest moonlit sacrifice. Head buried in the Ozark soil, skin on ice for a belt and hatband, muscled  cleaned carcass chopped for easy cooking on skewers, a dish of Rattlesnake Pie, the most memorable of horrible poems the master of the mike recites for his cheering handfuls of acquaintance at Wired-Up.   

The Willing Victim completes the circle, a world under darkness, uncovering the unrevealed.  For the love of the story, for the need to tell his story: Wednesday Night open-mic. Wednesday nights across the country in a college town near you or the big city or suburbs in places far from these rocky hills.  The stories flow, the rhymes inspire his spirit, eyes shut their last a few years ago. His story lives, the need for words, for tones, for rhythms, for love endures.

Everyone at that campfire on the famous night of sacrifice remember the time they ate Rattlesnake Pie, in the Ozarks, full moon and stars shining brightly. The Lesser Light shines its solar reflection fully on this group, a night emblazoned on their spirits.  An idiot drunken festival of campfire light frozen for future revelers. Memory marker unlike any other.

 Camera-phone videos and the occasional camcorder recorded the open-mic  Moment  for posterity, the story lights the fire, the ancient remnant of Titanic earth age recites the utterance of the eternal zephyrs.  Never ceasing,  contained in the earth vacuum, in motion.  As ancient as the Guest of the campfire. The Serpent slithers no more upon its belly; the winds continue their paths, partaking of earth supper.  The poems endure with this crowd of live performance junkies, awaiting the next great Moment.  I was there, the common tale of those who remember the night and the legendary recollection of the Dimmest Limelight, Wired-Up, a casual coffeehouse.  Memories of the Day.  Alive, expressing a small contribution  to the Whole, never again.  Spoken Word has faded, disappeared in these parts.  Word is expressed with music (if you can hear them). Poverty blankets, comfort,  for the naturally rebellious and unsettled.  Making sense of this world the way he best knew how; a life cut far too short.  Crowds at the coffeehouse can see his picture, mike in hand  in the obscure corner, set beside art of a local, hanging for years gathering dust. Poetry slammers don't forget the legends.  Rattlesnake Pie.  Everyone's  heard that one.  Slithering magic remains.

Milestone moments

On milestone days, such as today, January 1, 2014, I often think of home. According to Augustine, past, present, and future time are all understood through the grounding of perception in the present.  Without the present, there can be no valid memory of the past.  Present circumstances are a prism which cannot be circumvented.  The geography of childhood memory is the imprint which will ever follow the mind's and the body's path through the world of "coming-to-be" and "passing away".  I was raised in a geography of Crowley's Ridge: Forests, water, and clearings where bean fields, cotton fields, and occasionally milo were grown en masse in large-scale farming operations whose crops were dictated by financial interests outside the Delta region. 

The sloughs, creeks, canals, oxbow lakes, man-made lakes, the St. Francis National Forest, Big Creek, the St. Francis, L'Anguille, Mississippi, and the Arkansas rivers created by millennia of plate tectonics, ice melt, weathering, and natural decay and fossilization.  De Soto's chroniclers of his years-long entrada through the southeastern and middle southern regions of North America,  claim the region was the most populous they had encountered.  Waves of death and migration left the region a veritable wilderness after European contact, possibly hastened by unbearable drought conditions of the time.  I arrived to the landscape roughly 150 years since European and later African peoples began shaping the land as it appears today.  Much of Phillips County was too difficult a place to cut all the timber and replace it with fields of row-crops until well into the 20th century, though the region had its share of feudal plantations prior to the Civil War. 

My young mind was shaped by the world immediately surrounding me like any human undergoing cognitive development.  It is inescapable.  I remember every step of some of my long walks through the forest on Crowley's Ridge;  today I would describe the walk as a hike (hardly a word I would have used until I moved to the Ozarks nearly 20 years ago).  I look forward, on these milestone days, to remembering my past, the past unworthy of those gathering the story of our version of collective memory.  My anonymous past combined with the ocean of human conscious, however, is certainly worthy of remembrance and analysis.  A lot of ghosts in the Arkansas Delta for a wannabe medium to discern.  These lands are filled with the ghosts of the instant, the present of these people who have come and gone.  My view of the world is tightly linked to my instant, just as it must have been for ancient humans.  Their present remains in shadow and any medium worth his/her salt cannot possibly miss these remains of lives occupying the land prior to European conquest of the continent and settlement of their own peoples and those from Africa, beginning the depopulation of native peoples on North America.  Interesting to see bits and pieces of tv shows with a medium communicating with the auras or ghosts in buildings or on grounds that certainly were known to have been inhabited and shaped by humans millennia ago, but usually no contact.  Perhaps the ghosts of our conscious minds flicker and fade just as the physical body dies and decays. 

Every day is an opportunity to learn;  perhaps the most important lesson I learned from my youthful geography.  William Least Heat-Moon in Prairyerth included a passage from Joseph Brodsky's "Strophes"(1978), "Geography blended with time equals destiny." The sentiment seems to apply to the Flint Hills as it does to the Delta hardwood riverine region. In the woods behind my childhood home, the remains of squatters camps dot the hills. Tobacco cans, the metal guts of mattresses, surviving planks of wood and the headstones along the ruts on the crest of the hill provide evidence of the movement and settlement of people in this area in more recent times. The cans looked like WW II era advertisement and packaging.  Not sure.  My wish is for everyone to reacquaint with the past present of childhood and remember the home county as we saw it then at least for the briefest instant. Pay attention to the little things in your field of perception.  Might be surprised what you stumble over.  Have a great 2014!  We all deserve it.