Oaxaca at the End of the World (Part 1)

Oaxaca at the End of the World

*All italicized lines taken from Song of the Open Road by Walt Whitman

PART 1: Before Oaxaca at the End of the World

1

Old man declares:

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose...

Young man, listening, wonders: ‘wherever have I chosen? From where and why? And of practical limits, dreams and intentions? 

‘I will...

Well, before he continues, he asks the Old Man to please tell him once more the stances that took him to his road.

Old Man continues:

Not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune. 

Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms.

‘Yes yes,’ the Young Man cuts him off, ‘the need for money as security, status in expertise. A world of injustice, environmental collapse. Running in fear and desperation, right? 

‘How can I enjoy the fruits of my labor when they come at a cost far greater than labor? ‘With whom can I communicate? Agree or disagree the situation sits. 

‘A moment of silence: 

‘An answer! 

‘A subsequent moment: 

‘a subsequent answer... 

‘One fixed star in the sky and a compass is restored. One confident mountain to the north and topography is born and soon after, peopled. 

‘I look to neither land nor sky, as I look not to one story nor another. 

‘They are all here together: the swamping story of the surface. 

‘I navigate insofar as the word means to hit not rocks nor land mines (nor police checkpoints). 

‘Afloat upon a thriving, writhing island, uniform in its multitude of colors and relations.  

‘(Suckling softly, we carry our heads and the histories of our hearts within us. Every here. As large as a leaf of grass: an ego or an empire. A trite cage weighed down by our own bodies, lethargic and overly-sensitive, paling at the soft brush of a clod of dirt.)

2

‘When every point on a road is also the home of a home. Each particle placed by forces unseen but as real as the wind. What is there to see (truly!) if not the story of a home? (which moving along the silhouetted show of an ongoing road, one cannot care to see.)

‘But we try! O how we try! For every figure we pass is in full swing in the life of her story, caught in mid-stride, going somewhere, returning drunk, hearing that awful life changing news, finally crossing that rite of passage. 

‘Language as an atmosphere, supersaturated and hued. In details are aesthetics. All else is everything else. Allons!

3

‘But wait. I open my eyes to see. Open my lungs to feel that softest touch that is always already there! Every detail: a miracle. Every global event: a way to pass the time. Every scrap of information, once born, opens itself to all seeking hearts that care to meet its gaze. If not now then nothing!

‘You! Why were you built that way? Who carved you so carefully and whose handprints are dried inside your now-cracking sidewalks? Who couldn’t care to paint you and to what end are you fenced in such a way? 

‘You! Whose child’s hopes mural’d you likewise and how many footfalls did it take to shape your skeleton? 

‘Turning my eyes to your long-forgotten forms, I demand in return that you change me! 

Apres homage, suffusion. I am here, open, soft spots exposed. Give me all you have experienced, all that weather has taught you to know. Give! 

‘Watching the sky, I see that the weather has come to you. Well I go to the weather to file the report. I am a library, I am the ocean, I am the tiny man-made drain at the bottom of a landfill. I hold all that has been and only in me can you conceive all that will be... 

‘But first, you’ve got to play your part. Suffuse me!’  

4

Young Man with his demands relents. In a moment of reflection, recognition:

‘Realities expanding to the right hand and to the left. A great music descends from inside the mind of a body in flow. A tragic dirge on a subway line stretches the corners of sad and defeated eyes and tells a tale only open to him who has eyes to see. 

Ah, but eyes are fickle things. They see what the heart feels and alas! the heart is equally fickle. There is no voice nor rhythm nor light nor dark nor truth. There is only the spectrum of mood. And therein lies all breadth of experience.’

Today mood says to him, ‘You are the first who has ever seen a sad jazz man on a subway line.’

Today mood says to him, ‘You are the cliche that only privilege can afford.’ 

Today mood says to him, ‘Your destiny has brought you home.’ 

Today mood says to him, ‘You’re wasting your time, hiding from responsibilities.’

‘Mood,’ he shouts back, ‘I am not afraid of your whimsy, though you keep me on my toes! 

‘Mood,’ he shouts back, ‘please hold me for I am tired and hungry and scared! 

‘Mood,’ he whispers back in an exposed and sensual tone, ‘you are more of me than anything I could ever dream to say. 

‘Mood, you are more me than my memories. In my naivety I once dreamt of heroism and miracles. Now I know that tying my shoe is a miracle when Miracle is in my blood, and rescuing a city as the levees give way is just plain pragmatic work. 

‘I now know I like life and people when I’m feeling likable. And I like nothing nor the sort when I’m feeling unlikable.’ 

5

He continues:

‘Recognizing lines and limits, I declare myself free of past enslavements. 

Now humble, creeping on bleeding kneecaps across cobblestone salvations, listening through cottonballs constantly pulled from my ears. Pausing, searching, receiving, considering, releasing myself from one bondage to a new, more readily agreed upon institution of bondage. 

Recognizing lines and limits, on fresh terms, built from experience, not hope nor fear. Picking my way through cobblestones, calling the evercalling Voice’s call’s bluff: ‘tis bankrupt of real ideas.’

‘And from the vantage of the ground spiced with momentary excursions to the stars, I see the boundless draughts of ways, and words like lines of ants picking slowly through the weeds, carrying one grain of sand at a time. 

‘I am better than I ever could have dreamt in some ways, but in the obvious ways, ever so much worse!

‘I have forgotten how to say thank you while gradually learning how to be thank-full. I have lost track of kindnesses and am losing track of unkindnesses. It all seems the same blessing, the same curse as it comes like one’s own words back on silver platters to the table for dining. Whoever unkinds me, we are all unkind together. Whoever kinds me, basks in kind as well. 

‘The atmosphere in flux. 

‘To whom do I direct my ‘thank you’? I feel none are quite responsible. Instead I fill the room with thanks in anticipation. 

‘The experience alone speaks all in my stead.

6

‘Beauty has lost its meaning. Instead there is only warm and there is cold. These are as the seasons in the year: each requires its unique apparel.

‘And yet within these clothes, there is such a thing as free and such a thing as not so free. 

‘She who has poetry has no need for laws or beliefs. 

‘She who has poetry can truly be as free as a campfire under the stars. 

‘All others must wrap more tightly their apparel, even in the warmest of months.

‘What I know of wisdom: wisdom is never in words, but only in grace. 

‘Wisdom is in reactions, housed somewhere in the eyes.  

‘Wisdom is cool.  

‘Wisdom knows what’s going down in the room, and to the lovers and the haters, equally in stride, wisdom is boundlessly compassionate. 

‘Wisdom does not give a shit about your manifesto.

‘If you think the world lacks love then you yourself lack love. 

‘All that a human being is capable of seeing is all that that human being has become. 

‘But who can teach a blind man to see? It is said that if a man is blind long enough, he may develop a second sight: the ability to see with his fingers. 

‘But who can teach a blind man to second see?  

7

‘The Soul and its ever provoking questions, Given this then and that, how then shall? What is to be done? Knowing nothing, why the ever-present insistence of...well... Something? 

‘With the expected death of expectations, what seeds of new buds must be planted today if we are to eat a few months down the line? 

‘And what of cultivation?

‘Who are these people? What do I share with them? Is it the case that each stands an opportunity for communion or are there but a choice beckoning few with whom my path forward will continue only in standing still?

‘Each stranger sent, preordained by God as a blessing, a lesson, or a message? What do I owe them? And why can I only in some moments, in the recesses of a meditation, remember that significance so strongly?’

8

He retreats from the difficulties of a desperate and hedonistic existence. 

He retreats from the pretensions of the word, from the strengths rightly weighed, and from the narrative duly spun. 

He retreats to the obscurity of silence: a place beyond and before happiness: to the roost of a canvas, where a painter, after a life of testing his mettle and drinking his wine, like so many times before, begins again. 

He retreats to Oaxaca at the End of the World.

Here he lays in fluidity, stripped of prerequisites, lost of a name or a purpose, naked, bringing only instincts and inklings of recollections. Without a language, learning to speak once more as a child. No reference to refer to, only the subtle sparks held in pockets and in eyes. 

The Young Man duly and newly created takes whatever shape the local basin would have him in.