Riffing On Old

A few background notes: A little over a year ago I took a half day motorcycle ride on some of the back roads north of Auburn, Alabama, where I live. My specific purpose was to photograph some old buildings along a ten-mile stretch of highway between Camp Hill and Lafayette. I thought that eventually I would do some research into them and write their histories. But ideas have a way of mutating, and I soon found myself speculating on the simple fact that they were old. I began to notice other old things that had been cluttering my life, or simply catching my attention: furniture, collectibles, books, my birth certificate, not to mention ideas, whose importance sometimes becomes trapped in the times they are linked to but which have, if we listen, something to say to us again. And I began thinking about the word old itself and the way we use it so casually, when it could be said that the condition it names, and the processes that get us there, are anything but casual, though they happen almost without our noticing them. And when we do notice them, it’s usually too late. I don’t have a particularly morbid fixation on the subject, however personally I’m embedded in it (as the calendar constantly reminds me), but because the subject seems so fertile, I composed these riffs on the word and the ideas it suggests. More, I’m sure, will follow.


"Riffing On Old"

Out there beyond the chain link fence, I can make out the ruptured gas tank of a 1994 Honda Nighthawk and the twisted frame of an old Triumph. Elsewhere, ripped leather seats, corkscrewed headers, pretzeled handlebars amputated from a missing triple clamp. A 2005 Suzuki GSX 1000 R shows signs that it caught, at full lean, the heat-softened ooze of a tar strip and flung its bewildered owner across the yellow line under a high sun and a Ford pickup. Front forks and frame tubes reach into the east Alabama air like imploring bones. Years of alchemic rain and humid summers have transmuted once shiny iron into the dusty brown of worn spark plugs. Many of these motorcycles were new rolling stock at the time of America’s troubled fin de siècle, fewer than ten years ago. And now here they are, a sundered remuda, forgotten objects good for photographic study but not much else. Like the times they evoke, they seem remarkable mostly for the damage that has been done to them. And yet it is in just this state of wreckage that they bring to mind a simple thought. To be damaged means to have lived. To be living is to be on the verge of enduring more damage, not merely to be alive, immobile and voiceless. Life cuts. More life heals. That’s the story.

A motorcycle has brought me here, and I’m leaning against it, reviewing the pictures I’ve taken. I don’t get too far before a dog with weight-lifter’s shoulders comes running toward me from the shade of a school bus. Dogs can dig under fences, so I stuff the camera in the tank bag, put on my helmet, and ride toward Camp Hill. Here the highway weaves a gentle S through a mostly-abandoned downtown, past the high school and football field and a few crumbling houses, unlivable by their looks but lived in any way. The shadow of a closed-down convenience store (COLD BEVERAGES, CIGARETTES, DELI) provides little relief from the sun. A police car is parked in front of the wood-framed two-story across the street. There is no breeze to speak of, but small tornadoes of dust rise from the front yard. A knot of people surrounds the officer, whose attention is divided between a gesticulating woman yelling something and a group of children jostling one another for a glimpse into his car. He is a thick, muscular black man, and every now and then a flash of blue light catches his face and puts a lavender shine on his finely-wrought cheekbones. The house badly needs a coat of paint. The porch sags, and missing shingles reveal bare spots on the roof. I would like to take a picture. There is an unstaged ordinariness to it, an everyday tableau of a run-down part of America as real and unchangeable now as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. It’s what I imagine Currier and Ives would have painted if they’d known about social realism.

Not everything old belongs earthed and stone-marked. I own three hand-cranked coffee grinders, still in use. One dates from the late 1800s. It looks like the one Claire Trevor uses in Stagecoach. On a bookcase sits an eight-day clock, still with the key, still beating. My wife had discovered a note tucked in the back: an aunt four generations ago had carried it from Pennsylvania across the Alleghenies into Ohio in 1868. In our kitchen is a Hoosier Cabinet dating from the Taft administration. We had rescued it one Christmas season on the literal eve of its destruction, in near ruin, in Tallassee, Alabama. You’ll see Hoosier Cabinets in movies with the unfortunately domesticated Myrna Loy or Claudette Colbert. One gets obliterated by a spaceship in the 1952 War of the Worlds. Ours, manufactured in Elwood, Indiana, by Sellers, a company defunct since World War II, lacks the flour bin and sifter, but the white steel table, scarred by cigarettes, slides, and I replaced the hardware attaching the shelf unit to the bottom cabinet, and the drawer knobs accept the screw (slotted, the so-called Robertson screw, midwived c. 1908, not the Phillips, patented in 1935) from the outside, visible to everyone, and therefore honestly, and the whole assembly sits on metal frame legs and cast wheels, wobbly and uncertain, true, but the roll top rolls smoothly like a window shade, and behind it sits a collection of prewar lusterware from olden Japan, of a time before the idea of crashing old airplanes into a ship full of young men had crept like disease into an old admiral’s brain.

Samuel Johnson delivers old of ten definitions in the sixth edition of his Dictionary (1785), including “not young,’ “not new,” and "not modern.” If repetitious, he is also comprehensive, sometimes playfully so. He leaves it for you to decide if something “decayed by time” is necessarily “of long continuance” or was “begun long ago” or has merely been “subsisting before something else.” My favorite is: “A word to signify in burlesque language, more than enough,” which sounds like another James Boswell/chorus girl hook up, and Johnson’s definition of burlesque in its adjectival form (now archaic) puts us in the ballpark: “tending to raise laughter by unnatural or unsuitable language or images.” He instances, however, Joseph Addison’s complaint that Homer created burlesque characters in violation of the somber grandeur of the epic poem. Just down the column from old you’ll find olden, “ancient,” but Johnson has been dead since December 13 the previous year (he was 75), and like one of the departed come back to scold us, he pronounces, “This word is not now in use,” though it most certainly is. The entry before olden is oldfashioned (out of alphabetical order, notice), “Formed according to obsolete custom.” If you’re thinking Hoosier Cabinets, Wedgewood china, or side valve flatheads, Johnson’s example is John Dryden’s rendering of Chaucer’s Middle English into modern (c. 1700) English. Finally there’s oldness, which Johnson unhelpfully defines as “not newness,” which seems beneath his usual standards. Missing from the 6th edition are some gems from earlier editions: oldish (“somewhat old”), oldsaid (“long since said” and “reported of old,” with examples from—who else?--Spenser), and oldwife, wherein the dictionary writer displays his occasionally off-putting ill-temper: “a contemptuous name for an old prating woman.” It is to be noted that ancient and half a dozen of its derivatives (all appearing immediately after anchovy, “a little sea-fish, much used by way of sauce, or seasoning”) use “old,” suffixed and not, in most of their definitions, illustrating one of the chief hazards of lexicography: recursive self-referentiality.

I spend the next two hours riding back and forth along the highway east of Camp Hill, stopping to take pictures of the numerous abandoned buildings. Of some there is nothing left but what the fire didn’t take. Others appear to have been simply abandoned, left to the caprices of weather, time, bugs, weeds, and gravity. Anyone familiar with the South knows that the natural world can surround and choke off the artificial world in a span of time so astonishingly short, that untended buildings the size of warehouses will be quickly engulfed in a sea of voracious green. The remains of a Pure gas station bear witness. It is imprisoned behind a wall of kudzu, poison ivy, and saw grass, and in a few more decades might disappear altogether, even though it sits no more than thirty feet from the road. Approaching it I see the trusses first, broken girders with ripped pieces of corrugated metal roofing that suggest wind damage. The “For Sale by Owner” sign appears recent, but there is hardly more than a shell worth buying.

A half mile down, on the other side of the highway, at the intersection of an unmarked, narrow road that disappears into the pines, is the white-washed husk of a dance club. It sits well back from the road, fronted by a large dirt parking lot, now grown over with tall grass and scruffy wild azaleas. A sign at the corner provides some provenance, and a glimpse into rural linguistics: “OPEN AIR MUSIC PARK ENTERTAINMENT AT IT’S BEST!,” and below, “CAMP HILL DRAG STRIP OPEN EVERY SUNDAY,” partnered with a Budweiser logo. Shingles are gone from parts of the club’s roof, and the rafters of an annex have caved in, giving the whole complex the look of a bombed out building. Along the highway between Camp Hill and Lafayette, a distance of ten miles, there does not appear to be a single structure suitable for human occupancy. You would think all of humanity had been driven out by a disease known by no other symptom than the emptiness it leaves behind.

If old things connect us with the past that existed before us, they also connect us to a future that patiently awaits our absence. A search of the Internet brought me to a 1929 Harley-Davidson Model B (for battery/coil), unHarley-like in its single cylinder 21 cubic-inch engine, once owned by Steve McQueen. He had restored it to its original khaki paint job with red and orange pinstriping. It sold at auction after his death for $37,440.00. The late actor also had owned a pristine white 1934 Indian Sport Scout, which sold, original in everything but the tires, for $177,500.00. A fondness for collecting expresses an indulgence and perhaps a belief that by surrounding ourselves with old things we escape the two-handed grip of time and decay. Montaigne surrounded himself with old books, which he thought “fuller and stronger” than new ones, which he didn’t care for, though he confessed a disinterest in the Greeks, whose books are the oldest. But his love of books reveals a contradiction. On the one hand, “I seek, in the reading of books, only to please myself, by an honest diversion; after a charge or two, I give them over,” suggesting a dilettante easily bored. But we also find in the same essay (“Of Books”): “My sight is confounded and dissipated with poring.” There is no record that Montaigne suffered from blindness, and he lived an active life, though as he got older he occupied it more and more with contemplation in the enclosure of his library writing his Essais. In these we find the clues a peripatetic mind drops when it makes its own inner workings the object of its study, and Montaigne found his mind to be endlessly fascinating. He writes in “That To Study Philosophy Is To Learn To Die” that we have “already outlived the ordinary term of life” (he was, he says, thirty-nine when he wrote this), and we are fools at any age to think we’ll be alive as soon as tomorrow: “who has assured unto thee the term of life?” All this one could expect from a Roman Catholic still feeling the heat of the medieval church (the light had gone out long centuries before). But there is no theology to explain how a man writing the work that would make him immortal could think himself, for all but the most practical purposes, dead, but here he is in his mid-forties composing his epitaph: “For my part, I believe our souls are adults at twenty as much as they ever are like to be, and as capable then as ever. A soul that has not by that time given evident earnest of its force and virtue will never after come to proof.”

What the ancient Greeks called arete—virtue, living to the fullness of one’s nature—followed you, they believed, to the grave and beyond, which contradicts Montaigne and possibly explains his aversion to their books. Arete included the injunction to live not only with the knowledge that you will surely die, but that your exit from the world will be either noble or contemptible. There was no in-between. You lived, to whatever age, for the purpose of earning a respectable death, but because the Greeks, like the Christians to come later, believed you deserved nothing better than a shabby and wretched death—for such was life--the formula for living well could be tricky. Our modern sophistication precludes such thinking. Death, like its precursor, aging, is unjust, almost unnatural, certainly undeserving in its wretched form, not something we should prepare for, so we have left the ancient logic of choice behind us. Perhaps this was to be expected. Examined carefully, the old logic refutes itself all the time; most lives end with no more drama than the sudden stopping of a clock. All the more reason, Montaigne and the Greeks would agree, that if you make the existential choice each day to ride—I speak not just of motorcycles--accept that you will end up in the graveyard of discarded appliances, partners in the clearing away of the rusty and shattered for the shiny and whole. That’s the story, too.

But there is much to be done in the meantime. The Pure gas station tells a story, one that was common across much of America, and still has not, I’ve observed, disappeared. It is of a man, about fifty, arthritic of back, wearing stained overalls and a grease-stained John Deere baseball cap. He is stepping out of a pickup truck. A headlight is missing and the rocker panels are poxed with dents and rust. His fingers are dirty and dabbed with dried blood, hard to make out against his black skin, residue from too many scrapes with rust-stuck engine bolts. The truck belches a final cloud of blue smoke as the engine dies. The soles of his boots are separating from the uppers. There will be hostile stares when he enters, and the usual language that greets the unwelcomed other. But he wants a pack of cigarettes and a cold drink, and surely no one nowadays can object to that, though they will (haven’t they always?). When he steps inside, into a wall of conditioned air, cold with malice, he is alert and guarded, a habit he has acquired over the long years. Three men are sitting at a table in the center of the room next to the potato chips and candy bars: in work clothes, he notices, work clothes like his, daubed in hand-prints of oil stains and dried scabs of earth, smoking, as he hopes to be, cold drinks before them, and they see him and their conversation stops. The clerk glances up from his newspaper and notes his presence, frowning. A throat is cleared at the table. He hears it, looks over, but only for an instant. He doesn’t want to make eye contact. The men lean in, heads almost touching, whisper, laugh. The clerk finally stands up. Money and goods are exchanged, and he turns to leave. There are now two men at the table. He sees no one when he gets outside, the emptiness a fragment of his fear, and gets in his truck. Hands shaking, he tears open the pack and lights a cigarette and pulls deeply and winces at the sudden tightness in his chest. He starts the engine and slowly pulls away. When he turns onto the highway he sees for the first time the folded piece of paper under the windshield wiper.

Readers who want to know what the note says may be depriving themselves of one of the chief pleasures of reading, and asking too much of the writer. In truth, I don’t know what the note says. But I can tell you this. He reads it and stuffs it in his pocket and resolves that he’ll go back there everyday until there is not one square inch of the place the kudzu has not reclaimed.

Welcome!

Poesis is the ancient Greek word for “make” or “compose.” It is the source of the English word poetry, and both its ancient and modern meanings connote imaginative creativity. Techne, also from ancient Greek, means “art” or “craft,” or what Aristotle describes in Poetics as the application of knowledge of the principles of composition toward some end. This is the source of the English word technique, something akin to the skills associated with the mechanical arts. Put them together and you have the name I’ve given to my blog. What I create I then subject to the disciplining forces of craft, if not always with success, I hope always without becoming too mechanical to lose all interest.

Over time I’ll be putting up anything from creative nonfiction pieces (see “Riffing on Old"), short fiction (forthcoming: a man becomes obsessed with a woman in a painting before embarking on a walking tour of Savannah, culminating in his getting lost in a cemetery), and, beginning soon, an occasional continuing series of my misadventures in learning to play the guitar I’ll be calling “Guitar Chump Chronicles.” Not everything I put up will be finished. It’s in my nature to be experimental, so don’t be surprised if I pull something down and rework it. As I told someone a while back, once written, never finished. The essence of poesis techne.

I want to thank three people for encouraging me in starting this. Tiffany Clemons, a former student and now a good friend, prodded me to start a blog after her own blog (Breakfast at Tiffany’s at www.neologismsbytiff.blogspot.com/) got off to such a rousing start. Kat Privett-Duren (A Witchy Thought at http://009secretagentkitty.blogspot.com/), a long-time friend, loaned me her laptop and front porch while she walked me through the initial steps of setting up this blog site. This was right after her husband, Todd, taught me my first set of scales on his guitar. It was a most productive afternoon. Finally, and not least, my wife, Carol, has been egging me on to get back into writing for more years than I care to acknowledge. Her confidence is more than inspiring. I gratefully dedicate my first piece, "Riffing on Old," to her.