Below is some scrap of something that I’m sure bears no relationship to whatever I’m writing now. It’s a desktop orphan, the digital version of something scrawled on a bar napkin or the back of a flyer for an ice cream social. I’m a pack rat. I keep shit that should be tossed. If it becomes an entry it becomes part of the record.
I’ve been using the phrase bone deep, not so much in a digital sense as in an analog sense. Although I cuss a lot (digital and analog, verbal and written) for just meter, I also cuss for emphasis. I think bone deep is more emphatic than fucking, shitting or pissing deep. Fucking deep sounds like a valley boy trying to say profound, I don’t want to speculate on the possible meanings of shit deep and I really don’t want to speculate on piss deep except that it sounds painful. Bone deep is a way of saying to the very core. The analogy is that you feel an emotion all the way to your skeleton, the skinny man trying to get out; you feel it all the way to your death. You’d think that would be in wedding vows; instead of I love you with all my heart, I love you to my bones.
I was in a brief discussion here about connection to the land, empathizing too with how far I was from the land I am connected too. English is an awkward language to frame that discussion in. American even more so, despite the old saw about England and America being two countries separated by a common language (I fully expect someone to correct that), that’s not where I’m going. America is the end game of manifest destiny; it’s as far as western civilization can push it’s culture, morality, sense of entitlement. If we did not love the land then the end game would be that we are a loveless people or that in a grand sense love is unrequited.
Like any other sort of love there are pitfalls, traps, wanton ecstasy and the hard crash of despair, uselessness and the fear of death. Like any sort of love or roller coaster, it demands commitment, if not fidelity, labor if not toil, fervor if not passion. Hmmm, maybe there is a connection between this entry and what’s below. I haven’t read the orphan this morning, it was a free association around the line “I’m just like everyone else only more so”. I think of the perpetrator of that line as being everyman (no gender games here, by man I mean humanity). I think I’m as qualified as anyone else to talk about love and I think I don’t understand it at all. I also know that thinking has even less to do with love than the physical heart or the skeleton except in the grand underlying theme of the grand picture; death.
The love of a child is the fear of death; it’s the only fear of death that will freeze me in my tracks. Very close to that is the love of a pet and yet you expect from the very beginning to outlive your pet. The fervor of patriotism, love of country, is the fear of failure, like a football game you feel if you aren’t paying close attention and yelling “Hang on to the ball this time you beautiful bastard” you’ll be the one responsible for the loss. Romantic love, well, when the fear of death creeps in there you need to either heal together or apart, the fear of death is more abstract, it’s more a fear of not living than a fear of dying. Love of the land is damn close to a reconciliation with death; unlike looking at the stars or the rounded horizon of an ocean and either talking about your own insignificance or warm satisfaction that you are allowed to play any role at all, even just a walk on part without line, the land you can touch, climb and sift the high dirt through your hands, or the dark fertile loam in the valley. It’s the experiential piece of the stars or the ocean, the land is like some ancient benevolent beast that crawls through the stars, carries the water, was here before you and will be here after you. You can feel it in your bones.
And whereas any other love can turn, love of the land stays in your bones, doesn’t need your acquiescence, it’s either there from your first breath to your last or not there at all. The other sort of loves, even with their biological imperative, or, as with patriotism, a cultural imperative, need maintenance, an extreme for instance might be no one feels forsaken by the land. Sure farmers with a bad crop that will ruin them might curse the land the way one curses god, but you don’t curse an abstract unless you are a true believer, you don’t stop returning phone calls, or divvy up belongings or burn photographs or commit treason.
And that’s the long version of my stance; that love of the land comes from the spiritual body on man (humanity). I don’t know if there such a thing as god; I do know the human heart yearns for something so abstract we don’t even know how to give it a name so we come up with things like God(s). In me that sort of love is sated by the land that reverberates through my bones, power places, places where I can’t help but feel the grandeur through the entirety of my being with the surety that sans all my other senses I would still feel it. There are places in this state that I know are power places. I will go to these places when I am done mourning. Being out of sight of my Oregon is what I imagine the real core of Judea/Christian philosophy is; you are either in the sight of god or not in the sight of god. There is no fluffy cloud heaven or flaming hell in the real mythology; you either feel the wind in your hair and the crash of the river and the power through the rocks or you are denied the feeling.
I’m pushing against the grain of the brief note discussion on a more personal and eloquent entry than this rambling nonsense. That discussion ended with ‘When you point it out it’s gone’. I don’t disagree and yet this is what I do. I record things, I tippity-tap at a keyboard to remember who I am.
“Now you’re just lying.”
“No I’m not, I’m making things up, it’s a creative process. Lying is like saying I didn’t steal your wallet. It’s boring and transparent.”
“Narcissist. You think you're better, not boring. Even petty bullshit like not giving a straight answer has some grand and noble aspect beyond the ken of us mere mortals.”
“I never said that.”
“See? I’m bearing false witness; you have a creative process.”
“I don’t think I’m better. I’m just like everyone else only more so.”
“I say it’s less so.:
“Ok. It’s your world; I’m just living in it.”
“Huh. So I’ve been granted permission.”
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