TRIP PART 2
In Red Brick Small Towns

Last week Matthew and I made a makeshift song in his living room on a quiet street in Lewisburg Pennsylvania. The song, a study in 8 channels of perfection, rides on the simple brilliance of an old Donovan song about the colors which we love best, the colors which attach themselves to objects and run through our minds like old songs which cannot be erased. Our song was an experiment with nature and our life set to the games of language or an experiment with language and song set to nature and our life in it. And though it will not stand up as an absolutely creative way of making value, right then it was all wonder and color and experiment which is what life is when it is fun.

Matt and Olivia are becoming old friends who organize our lives around their visits or when we visit them. We schedule our own festivals and fill them with rituals. It sounds bizarre. But what we do is have intense discussions about creating joy or scraping our lives like open wounds. We listen to recordings of poets reading their poems and go to restaurants in order to review them according to what they do. We go to small town art museums to find new ways to experience the way objects find meaning. We hike after waterfalls like small children chasing soap bubbles and try hard to imagine that what we are doing is an adventure. And we are proud when one of us runs 26.2 miles so fast!

On our holidays the world fades a little, and for a few days what rises are late night documentaries and morning coffees which stand as the only things which matter. We sit perfectly still like bright fruit in a world without fruit bats and enjoy ourselves enormously. We even fight like sullen raccoons, hackles rising, only to realize that the problems we see are only chances and what matters are the possible endings of the marathons and not their epic beginnings which are never true. If we think about it long enough we realize that when you hold a black paper up to the sun it will “glisten in its minutest points with the most vivid colors” just like Goethe said (and the sun which is friendship in this bad metaphor will be filled with new magic).