The Dirt Road to Psychedelia

It's not that I'm homesick for the place I left; it's more that I'm homesick for the place it used to be. It's long gone now, except for the barest traces, and there is no pretending otherwise. 

The people who came before me might say the same about my era. There is a joke about Austin that it was always it's best just before you came. But maybe that goes for Texas as a whole.

All the same, that doesn't stop me from craving a Thundercloud sub every so often and missing the scent of mountain cedar and limestone dust. 

Anyway, here is a good documentary about psychedelic music, via the Internet Archive. 

The Dirt Road to Psychedelia

Salt-Free / The Fourth Dimension of Time

[Later, when I was in the hospital, I would have a recurring nightmare that blocks of sunlight were being hammered into my head. The blocks were meant to contain insight, but when I looked, the sunlight was empty. That's when I would wake up in a panic, remembering that I did not remember. 

It's funny, what the unconscious mind gets up to when we aren't there.]

1. 

On the second Sunday in May, my housemate and I were in the kitchen, leaning over a boiling pot of ramen. "This changes everything" he said, adding a handful of Costco dried mushrooms with a flourish. "Gives it an entirely different flavor." 

Suddenly my vision wavered. I thought at first it was steam from the pot. No, I thought. I remember.  This has happened before. Deja vu? No, a memory I had once, of something that had never happened. It was as vivid as something so nebulous could be. 

It had happened back in 2007, during that time of year when the weather was trying and failing to get properly warm. I was living in Victoria then, in the gold house, and on that day, I'd found myself pacing the floorboards, feeling haunted. A memory had come to me - it felt like a memory, anyway - very short, but distinct, of living somewhere else, another town, in another house, with someone I couldn't place. We were leaning over the stove in a steamy white kitchen. There was an impression of spindly space-age furnishings, table and chairs. We laughed, but there was a heaviness in the air, a sorrow, a sense of endings. The sort of regret that can follow you through time.   

I'd fretted restlessly for an entire afternoon, wondering where such a mental image had come from. I couldn't relate it to anything I'd done, or any place I'd been. Yet the melancholy tugged at my heart as if had all been real. For what? For whom? 

17 years later, I looked into the present and finally knew.

 

2.

The morning of the last Friday before I left Ohio, we were driving back from Perrysburg. I sat in the passenger seat, flipping through a copy of the Tao Te Ching. Anxiously, I closed my eyes and put my finger on a page at random. When I looked where my finger had landed, it was a phrase that said, "the fourth dimension of time." 

Just as we arrived home, where Tricky the cat sat at the kitchen threshold awaiting our return, we felt something pass through the room. It passed through us, too. Tricky raised her head, alert to the invisible motion. A sort of convulsive shudder, difficult to describe. I said, "Did you feel that?" My housemate replied, "a ripple in time."

It was a little while before I remembered the phrase I'd picked out of the Tao Te Ching.

3.

At the end of May, after I'd flown back to Texas with Tricky in tow, I stayed in a motel - the name escapes me now, but it hardly matters - while I waited for some plan to evolve. I knew this motel, because barely a year before, my friend and now-former housemate had come to stay. I was meant to be thinking of the future, but the sweltering heat made it nigh impossible. Since I'd arrived in Austin, everything had seemed blinding - too loud, too hot, too psychically polluted to bear contemplating at all. Already I was harboring the germ that would nearly kill me, but of course I didn't know it then. Instead, I sat on the balcony that by chance overlooked the path that we'd taken a year before, my friend and me, traipsing along, winding toward a future - now passed - that had seemed so bright. If I looked hard enough, I could swear I saw the air shimmer as our shades passed by. Look closely and you might see. 

...

In the hospital, these things came back slowly from the void where sepsis had left me. Time measured by the light out my window and salt-free meals brought three times a day. For a while it seemed I could let it drift away, all those memories, illness like a crossroads that time could not follow. I knew it would if I let it. I knew maybe I should. And yet I did not. And yet, and yet. 

...

We did make it back to Ohio, Tricky and me, worse for wear, eventually. But the ripple in time I'd somehow escaped took her away. She died soon after, near that same kitchen threshold, and I cried and cried and cried. She's buried at the corner of the house where the wind catches the leaves, but sometimes I hear her pattering around at night, somewhere, I imagine, in the fourth dimension of time. 

Whirlwind in Retrograde

"Don't go far off" he used to say, but in the end, he only wanted me to go.  

Some days, I walk out onto my doorstep and it's like a dream I had once, long ago. Chalky blue-white midwestern light and curiously elongated shadows. There is some solace in the way the wind and the trees aren't bothered about me; I just am, if I'm anything at all. 

There is a house on the next block with a row of temple bells out front. They chime with a most delicate sound. 

Once upon a time - that is to say, three or four years ago - I used to gaze out toward a point on the horizon, northeast beyond the cliffs, gaze at it until I could imagine seeing the traces of my attention there, a phantom signal against the sky. 

What was I signaling? Something desperately important, it seemed. A longed-for future. A magical elsewhere. A certain place where I was not. At night I gazed at the stars and dreamed. Twice I watched the earth's shadow cross the face of the moon and felt my destiny coming into being. My goddess is a goddess of eclipses, after all. 

Now I look out my southwestern window and understand so clearly that what I was signaling was my own self, looking back from where I came.

I think a lot about that place between what was then the future and the past. There was so much I did not see. Ohio like apple-raspberry candies from the dime store. Gingerbread, cloves and chamomile. Soft Sounds of the 70's. Cold grue and aquarium sky. From my limestone perch in Texas, I did not see this, nor hear it, nor feel it. What I sensed, on the other side of my prickly pear reality, was something golden and glimmering, reaching into the beyond. The glow of manifestation, maybe. I wonder now how much of it belonged to me. 

...

One night not long ago, I was at the library, a building that looks like it was designed by Escher on a bender. We sat in the atrium and listened to astronomers talk. Through the pointed panes of glass, a slow twilight was descending. My attention drifted upward until I could see the first stars. 

Far away, I sensed a faint blip on my inner radar, that signal trace of who I used to be. I signal back, a pinprick of light with the density of heartache. I tell her that I am here, looking at the sky 1353 miles away, and if you hurt, it's because the future hurts. But you did make it out, even if it wasn't like you imagined. You managed to do what you were supposed to do. You did make it there, eventually, and for a little while your wish was true. 

I already knew she heard me, because I'd heard it all those years ago. 

...

Now the solar eclipse is coming, and there is nothing to do but wait. We traveled here by the path of totality last summer, without knowing. The direction of the signal in the sky. It seems somehow significant now. 

For the moment I bide my time here in the track of the moon's shadow, among the flat fields and whirling leaves, searching the horizon for a signal from my next future. Perhaps, in the afternoon darkness - if I'm lucky - it will shine. 

Bluer Than Blue

It was about 4:30 in the afternoon on the 25th of May. I was walking down the hall when I'd turned to glance at the eastern window, through which you can see the shadow of the earth at dusk. Whatever it was that had caught my eye, there was no sign of evening yet. The sun was still high and bright, the sky was clear, and I realized I would rather be outside. I change my trajectory, turn around and go. 

Out in front, the older boys are washing their car, faint radio thrum as they each polish a side. Around the back, fleecy clouds are just beginning to rise. My youngest, in his last spring as a pre-teen, is occupying himself with characteristic self-possession. He experimentally spins in circles because he's just learned that, quote, "dizziness is fab." 

I make my way to the sunlit grass at the very back of the yard and pause for a moment. There is nothing unusual to see here, it's the same as it's always been, but then the feeling comes over me, the layering of time. It's a most remarkable effect. I take a seat on one of the ancient rocks that jut out of the ground, and notice. If I wasn't chatting with my own child and managed to overlook my aches and pains, I could easily convince myself that it was 40 years ago. Something about the air, the scent of the grass, the quality of light lifts the years away, leaving me free of the weight of age and knowledge. And yet, I know it is there. In that space between is something else, and I ponder it, despite not having the words.

My son, satisfactorily dizzy now, is singing a heartfelt song to the cat, because it's just that sort of day. We've all of us got a touch of spring fever, I guess. I turn my attention to the aged wooden posts holding up the clothesline - they might not be quite as old as the rock I'm sitting on, but getting up there. I notice one of them has a smear of blue paint on it, a smudged handprint maybe, even though there is nothing else here painted that shade. A story that I'd likely never know. The smudge resembled a map of an unknown place, and did not quite match the sky, even though they were both very, very blue. I sat there and let the feelings run through me, the weight of time and also the non-weight of it. 

Up above the paint-smudged post and the cross-piece where the rain-gauge has lived all my life, I can see the faint crescent of the daylight moon. Her horns are tilted downward, the way my great auntie used to say would spill out the rain. And she was right, of course, but at this moment, the clarity of the sky is striking. 

I think, life without you is gonna be bluer than blue, and I feel the sorrow that is the silent partner of time, the counterweight of earthly happiness. I never really imagined leaving Texas, but the feeling in the pit of my stomach tells me it's already past time to go. I tell the limestone and the prickly pear and the twisted chapote persimmon that I'm sorry, but the landscape only shrugs a little. It already knows the score. 

My youngest, done with his song now, skips back to the house. The older boys put up their polishing gear and murmur to each other as they walk away. The sun sinks just a bit lower. The wind begins to sigh. This moment - this one - in the sunlit grass will never come again. This moment is gone forever. 

If anyone else notices its passing, they give no indication. Like the tale of the blue map smudge on the clothesline post, only these traces remain.

Adventures In Orange

Gonzales, Texas, on a Tuesday afternoon. Wandering the quiet sun-bleached town. Remembering. Nothing special happened, no epiphany, just the slightest breath of the past, a faint scent to remind me of what it was like to look forward to something.

I snapped this in the mirrored window of a locksmith's shop ("space for rent", the sign said) because of the novelty of blending in with the color scheme.  It almost never happens, you know. I somehow usually manage to clash.

Do Not Cross The Hayfield

Do not cross the hayfield
As sets the blood-red sun

The Reaper's Ghost

The Anatomy Of Remembered Spaces

 

 A friend rang the other morning. He said, I'm calling from inside your old apartment. They are about to tear the building down.

And just like that, the place we used to live moves from tangible to intangible. It exists solely in memory now

Live long enough, and it's bound to happen. We don't only lose people, but we lose places, too. It's been happening at a steady clip as long as I can remember. It's progress, and commerce, urban development and all those other things. The grocery store of our daily errands is now a call center, the club where we used to dance becomes a gym.

 If  we believe in an afterlife, we can imagine that our lost loved ones are with us in spirit. Aside from the occasional time slip and trans-dimensional gas station, though, the existence of remembered spaces is far more nebulous than even a ghost. Unless, perhaps, the shades of long-ago shoppers still patrol the rows of telephonists, reaching for loaves of bread circa 1996.

 

The house of memory is a peculiar place; everything  lives on top of each other. The boundaries of such a house are permeable and strange. The empty room is never really empty. Minus space time and plus soul time, as Nabakov once said.

You wouldn't know it but there is someone hiding in that picture above. Of course you wouldn't, because he has concealed himself behind the bench. You could raise a legitimate point and say it doesn't matter, since until now, only he knew it and I knew it. If either of us forgets, is the meaning of the photo lost? If a 10 year-old boy hides behind a bench, sometime in the summer of 2001, and no one remembers, does he disappear forever?

For all practical purposes one could say yes, but as long as there are tales of long-dead monks roaming ruined churchyards and Roman soldiers marching along no longer existent roads, then I am not so sure.

 

The place had stood for 30 years, housing any number of college students, young marrieds, the elderly and refugees alike. Hardly any time at all in the great scheme of things, but more than enough time for the drama of human life to play out.  I would be delighted to learn, in 50 years time, of reports of disembodied laughter  and running footsteps at twilight, or the sound of splashing from a nonexistent pool. I can even imagine the astonished murmurs as a mirage of the lighted corner store sign (now also gone) appears in the night sky. 

And by then, only the old folks will remember why.

Lone Oak Cemetery, Part 4

We reached the cemetery about 45 minutes before dusk, to have a little time to take stock of our  surroundings. Was the place still as creepy? Yes, though not as creepy as it would become as night fell.

We wandered around taking photos and video, looking for details we might have missed. It was a pleasant enough night, if a bit cloudy. Everything was as usual. As the sun went down the wind began to kick up. The photos I'd taken so far looked ordinary enough when seen through the viewer, and then suddenly they were not. 

                                        

View of the west corner of the cemetery at twilight: 

Pollen? Dust? Insects? The dreaded, ubiquitous orbs? If you look closely, you can see there is one light for every tombstone in that corner, including a small one near the eeriest grave, the one where some have imagined hearing voices.

                                                                I immediately turned to the right and saw this in my viewfinder.

I moved on toward the southern part of the graveyard to a place where I felt a strangeness, an eddying wind and rustling leaves that sounded almost like voices. I came to the unusual resting place of Lily Linke, buried just outside the family plot, forever separate. It was here that I began to feel a distinct presence.

I felt the presence follow me onto the path, where I began to feel very uneasy. I told it to go in peace and it gradually drifted away.

It was beginning to feel too spooky, though I was prepared for that. I was determined I wouldn't be scared into running this time. But still, the feeling of being watched was unnerving.. It was time to leave.

In the distance beyond the path, I thought I'd photographed a light from a radio tower or a passing plane. But  I was wrong. There was no tower nor was there a plane that time of night. That tiny light in the distance hadn't been there at all.

I've been waiting for my brother to watch the videotape he recorded that night, but for some reason he seems reluctant to do so....

Lone Oak Cemetery, Part 3

It was nearly 17 years ago that my brother told me of something strange at Lone Oak. He had been visiting our aunt's grave late one afternoon, when his attention was caught by a headstone with a woman's photograph. The year of her death was 1919. He was completely alone in the cemetery, so I suppose he was unconcerned about being overheard when he spoke aloud: "Huh. I wonder if she died in the flu epidemic."

According to him, he immediately heard a buzzing in the air. It sounded like a lot of people whispering at once..Out of these sounds, he said, a distinct voice said "yes". It came from the left, from the grave of the woman's daughter. The whispering died away, and he was suddenly aware that the sun was very low in the sky and the wind was picking up. To hear him tell it, he couldn't get out of there fast enough.

It certainly sounded creepy. "Well, if you go out there, just don't go at sunset" he said.

It really was happenstance that the sun was beginning to set when my cousin and I wound our way to the cemetery gates later that year. It had been a long trip, we had spent hours at the library doing research and come all this way. It was less than fortunate timing, but we weren't going to not stop just because of that. Besides, we had  fresh cut roses to bring to our aunt, it would be a shame to waste them.

It was June, the grain was high in the fields. It felt so isolated, with only a few houses and a church across the road. The sun was on the horizon, but never mind, there was plenty of light left to do what we came to do. We laid the flowers for our aunt and decided to search out the grave where my brother heard the voice. It wasn't far - the grave of  a woman named Elsa, next to her daughter, Alma. Alma's photo plaque was sadly broken, but Elsa looked to be a sensible lady, not so scary. We heard no voices, but perhaps it  was at that point I began to feel a little strange.

I said nothing to my cousin, but  kept seeing movement out of the corner of my eye. There was nothing there of course, but even seeing nothing I could swear there was something.. I turned it over in my mind - the movements of trees, shadows? Perhaps those little flags placed on veteran's graves being whipped about in the wind. Nerves. Then again, this cemetery was peaceful. It didn't feel threatening. But why did I keep mistaking the shape of the headstones for people? Why did I feel so sure we were being watched?

We continued walking, my cousin reading out the women's names on the headstones: Mitta, Lille, Alamina.... "such pretty, old-fashioned names"  she said. It was dark enough that we noticed that the cross on the church opposite was lighted. We were nervous enough to feel comforted by it. The wind was really picking up.

              The lighted cross on the church opposite, July, 2012

We were walking toward the west corner - drawn by its relative isolation - when a car sped down  the narrow road through the cornfields. A young man out for a joyride perhaps. The car disappeared into the distance. We kept walking, but my cousin had become remarkably quiet. I wasn't feeling so chatty either. I wasn't scared exactly, but something was becoming very wrong. A strange thought came to me: "That was the first alarm."

 The sky was still streaked with pink but the sun had set.. The sound of the wind in the fields was not comforting. I hadn't realized the way wind can blow across flat land, that constant hollow rushing. It went on and on.

The man in the car sped past again. We saw him through the gates. That was the second alarm, I thought. My cousin kept looking  toward the lighted cross. I was beginning to feel real fear now, the kind that was like an outside pressure forcing my body to move. Five minutes later, the man in the car sped by again, and my cousin who looked  very white in the face, said. "I think we'd better go now." As we started to move toward the gate, the fear came upon us so strong that we began to run. It was a blind panic, terror. It seemed more than the fear that some guy might harass us on a country road at twilight, though that was bad enough. It seemed like something else. It was as if something had begun to yell at us to run.

We didn't speak for a while. When we did, we tried to think what happened. Well, that man in the car was unsettling, no? It could have been him who caused us to panic. But maybe not. There was something else there. We could feel it. That lighted cross on the church seemed almost as if it had a specific purpose, facing the graveyard that way. The next time we went, we made sure we brought a male friend, so we wouldn't have to worry about strange men on country roads. We went even later, at night. We wanted to know what it was that frightened us- maybe it was just that man, after all. Our friend was very jovial, out for a lark. I can't even say what happened - only that one moment we were walking down the lane in the pitch darkness, Jeff chuckling that we'd need a guardian for this - and the next we were all scrambling into the car, scared out of our minds. Even Jeff  was so frightened he couldn't open the simple latch on the gate - we jumped it instead.

A year later, I gave it another try, with another companion this time. I had brought him to show him this place where my some of my family had settled. Once again, we didn't mean to come at sunset, it was bad timing. Again, I felt safe enough not to forgo the visit. Probably I had exaggerated the fear in my mind. We walked about as the sun was setting. It was he who first pointed out the cradle boards around the grave in the west corner - I hadn't yet had the nerve to make it back there on my own. We crisscrossed the grounds, splitting up to examine things on our own. The sun had dropped below the horizon and the wind had begun to pick up the way it always seemed to do as night was falling. Again, I was amazed at how far sound carried there. There was no one to be seen for miles, but I could hear the sound of people working, building something perhaps, shouting to each other and banging away on something metal. .The sounds made it feel less lonely. It was getting quite dark and the wind was howling by then. I was back in the west corner, taking a closer look at those odd, out of place burial sites. They really were intriguing. The fear I'd felt must have been my imagination, it wasn't bad here at all....

I hear a faint sound - my companion is shouting my name into the wind. He's coming across the grounds, very fast, and says come on, we have to go, we have to go. I ask him what's up and he only  takes my arm and says "we have to go right now."  He's taking me back to the car - is prepared to carry me bodily if he has to, he says - when the fear hits me full on. My knees are so weak that I can barely get myself into the passengers seat. We go as fast as possible away from there. Finally my companion says "everything was fine one minute, the next there was a voice in my ear saying "get her out of here, now, run, RUN!'" It wasn't the sort of voice you could argue with.

On the long drive home, I said, "it surprises me the way sound carries - those people working must have been miles away". He looked puzzled. I said, "all those people shouting and banging; it was pretty loud. didn't you hear it?' He says, appalled, "honey, there wasn't any sound out there but the wind"

It would be a long time before any of us went back, but finally, we did. At twilight again, but this time on purpose.

.

Lone Oak Cemetery, part 2

The historical marker at Lone Oak Cemetery reads like this:

"On January 17 1897, German immigrants in the Geronimo area met at Specht school to discuss the need for a community cemetery. The group formed a "Friedhof Gestellschaft" or cemetery association and within a week purchased a five-acre plot of land from Ernst Puls and designated it the Lone Oak Cemetery.The following year, the first burial, that of the one week-old unnamed son of Ernst and Bertha Puls, took place. Since its founding, over 900 burials have taken place and several older 19th century graves have been relocated here as well."

It's a chilling irony  - Did the farmer who sold his land ever imagine the first burial would be his own child?

Perhaps, or perhaps not. Certainly there is evidence of the harshness of country life back then in the number of children's graves at Lone Oak. It's painful to contemplate the rows of headstones in the family plots where a child was lost every year. Even with the inscription wearing off the oldest  stones, there are many carved  with small lambs, slowly succumbing to the weather.

Most of the children's headstones are simple, though one stands out as more elaborate. The grave of a small boy (four or five years old, the inscription was too worn to be sure)  has a marble statue - perhaps a young Jesus or other saint - with a lamb at his side. The pedestal reads "watch until I come". A lot of care and expense must have been put into it. I wondered if his parents had been especially distraught over his loss; or perhaps it was that they had the financial means to express it when others had not. At the foot of the grave, a stone reads "baby love",  a sentiment that seems very unusual to find in a German-American cemetery at that time.and place. I think the answer is probably both - the heartbreak is almost palpable in the stone itself:

Even if the means to decorate the grave of a lost child might have been scarce, the effort was made nonetheless. This infant girl's grave, surrounded by her cradle, overwhelms me every time I see it.

There is another reason it troubles me though. It's not only the feeling of the loss or the sense of passing time. This grave is in the west corner, isolated, no one with her last name nearby. There are only a few graves in the west corner and none seem to be related. It's not likely that these were the graves of paupers - they all have markers - and they are not the oldest graves in the cemetery. They just seem... odd, out of place, distressing somehow.

The west corner is intriguing, if a bit unsettling, and it's possible to get lost in thought there before you realize the sun is sinking and dusk is coming way too fast.

Lone Oak Cemetery, Part 1

Coming further north to the place where I grew up, we took the opportunity to visit the small cemetery where a number of my relatives are buried. It's a quiet place on a lonely road, surrounded by acres of corn and sorghum fields.

As cemeteries go, it's a pleasant one. It's old fashioned, fairly plain, with a  few decorative cedars and one large oak tree that gives the cemetery its name. Many of the headstones are inscribed in German, the oldest  beginning to sink into the earth. Usually, the only sound you hear is the wind.

If one has to be buried, then I suppose it's not such a bad place to take your eternal rest.

Quite a few of the headstones even have photographs, which is nice, I think. It  gives one insight into the lives of  those interred there.

                                                 

 So yes, it's a pleasant place, very peaceful. Not imposing or intimidating, not even scary for a place that makes you contemplate mortality. In the daytime, at least..The problem with Lone Oak cemetery is what seems to happen at twilight, when everyone I've known to go there has had to leave at a terrified run....