It’s always a shock to find out you’re not the first human being ever in history. You run into some spice trader from the outer reaches who’s vending similar wares, you start talking to her, and you find out she’s got frankincense, too, and y’all are actually tuned into the same movie. There you were, moseying, minding your own business, and then it’s like: Woah, people have been on this frankincense shit, they have all these highly similar intimations, and there really is nothing new under the sun…
The whole road phenomenon is one such thing. Schleppers have been schlepping off to distant lands for a while now, ofttimes with no particular destination in mind. So, as the “Dispatches from the Road” series nears the end of its road, a peer-reviewed, systematic, and entirely exhaustive literature review is in order. What have other travelers been saying about this whole road thing? Quite a lot, as it turns out.
So here’s some prose, poetry, and wisdom for the week.
“Ready to go?”
Sometimes you’ve got somewhere in mind and it’s like this: you want to make it down to Rio Grande for New Year’s, tonight, and there’s only one way to get there, south, and you ask if everyone’s ready to hit the road.
“Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow,” said Mrs. Ramsay. “But you'll have to be up with the lark,” she added. (Virginia Woolf)
So, ebullient, you start packing your dirty t-shirt and socks not really paying any mind to the snow flakes that start drifting down past the window onto the tarped-up pool in the courtyard — until the man of reason interposes:
“But… it won’t be fine.” (Virginia Woolf)
The man of reason informs you that there’s snow on the pass and road closures all the way south. The routes are blocked off and speaking of which the tide’s coming in and Cherry Creek will be impassable in thirty minutes so you can count on not making camp on the opposite side tonight.
But you look ‘em right in the eyes, remembering there’s no security ‘round here, only opportunity, so you’d better get going, casting a “Thanks a lot” over the shoulder to keep away the devil.
But other times the devil catches up with you, he’s there before you alarm clock drones, and you have no option but to go arm in arm on your merry way down to the Rio Grande:
Early this morning
When you knocked upon my door
Early this morning ooh
When you knocked upon my door
And I said, “Hello Satan”
“I believe it's time to go” (Robert Johnson)
Still other times it’s more like this and the whole world’s been bringing you down (and the sea is the road):
… having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet… I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. (Herman Melville)
And there’s not really many better ways of explaining it, and whatever happens happens, and maybe you’ll remember some of it, maybe you won’t. You’ll be on the doorstep about to take flight when Allen Ginsberg asks you, he asks:
“What is the meaning of this voyage to New York? What kind of sordid business are you on now? I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?” (Jack Kerouac)
And you’ll have nothing better to do than croak back agape and repeat the strange question:
“Whither goest thou?” echoed Dean with his mouth open. We sat and didn't know what to say; there was nothing to talk about any more. The only thing to do was go. (Kerouac)
Because at a certain point it’s true, there’s really nothing left to be said and anything else would be besides the point and anyway once you’re gone it’s all good:
I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility. (Kerouac)
“Follow the signs”
The start moving and the world becomes entirely gilt-edged:
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.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.
The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.
(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)
…
I think heroic deeds were all conceiv’d in the open air, and all free poems also,
I think I could stop here myself and do miracles,
I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like, and whoever beholds me shall like me,
I think whoever I see must be happy. (Walt Whitman)
And if you haven’t left yet for unforeseen circumstances arising from this, that, and the other, you sit behind the snowy window pane thinking:
I’d gladly be the abandoned child on the pier setting out for the open sea, the young farm boy in the lane, whose forehead grazes the sky.
The paths are harsh. The little hills are cloaked with broom. The air is motionless. How far away the birds and the springs are! It can only be the end of the world, as you move forward. (Arthur Rimbaud)
So, following the poet’s advice, you move forward. You try different approaches south but they’re all still closed off for the snow, so you get some food and by 3 pm one highway’s open and the world unfurls in all directions and all there is to do is go:
You follow Highway 58, going north-east out of the city, and it is a good highway and new. Or was new, that day we went up it. You look up the highway and it is straight for miles, coming at you, with the black line down the center coming at and at you, black and slick and tarry-shining against the white of the slab, and the heat dazzles up from the white slab so that only the black line is clear, coming at you with the whine of the tires… (Robert Penn Warren)
And there’s some ancestral wellspring of manic-calm energy that takes the reins and leads down paths of systemic peril like don’t-try-this-at-home Neal Cassady wheeling his bus Furthur ever onwards:
When everybody else was stroked out with fatigue or the various pressures, Cassady could still be counted on to move. It was as if he never slept and didn't need to. For all his wild driving he always made it through the last clear oiled gap in the maze, like he knew it would be there all the time, which it always was. When the bus broke down, Cassady dove into the ancient innards and fixed it. He changed tires, lugging and heaving and jolting and bolting, with his fantastic muscles popping out striation by striation and his basilic veins gorged with blood and speed. Coming up over the Blue Ridge Mountains everybody was stoned on acid, Cassady included, and it was at that moment that he decided to make it all the way down the steepest, awfulest windingest mountain highway in the history of the world without using the brakes. The lurid bus started barreling down the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Kesey was up on top of the bus to take it all in. He was up there and he could feel the motion of the thing careening around the curves and the road rippling and writhing out in front of him like someone rippling a bull-whip. He felt totally synched with Cassady, however. It was as if, if he were panicked, Cassady would be panicked, panic would rush through the bus like an energy. And yet he never felt panic. It was an abstract thought. He had total faith in Cassady, but it was more than faith. It was as if Cassady, at the wheel, was in a state of satori, as totally into this very moment, Now, as a being can get, and for that moment they all shared it. (Tom Wolfe)
But as you pass slow-cruising pick-ups you check your bearings because the narrow path only grows narrower and you don’t want to miss your exit when you’re low on gas:
Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. (Matthew 7:13-14)
You squint your eyes and try to make out the tread marks of your ancestors in the chaparral and begin to panic when there’s nothing but round-baked cattle dung, beginning to reach for your phone to find the directions…
But be not overly disturbed just remember
The Great Way knows no impediments;
It does no pick and choose.
When you abandon attachment and aversion
You see it plainly;
Make a thousandth of an inch distinction,
Heaven and earth spring apart.
If you want it to appear before your eyes,
Cherish neither “for” nor “against.”
To compare what you like with what you dislike,
That is the disease of the mind.
Then you pass over the hidden meaning;
Peace of mind is needlessly troubled. (Seng-ts’an)
And that’s what happened - you made a distinction - so it’s back to the undifferentiated, just don’t mistake the one destination for the other, even though the mind grows tired and befuddled and wants to rest and stay awhile:
Whoever you are, come forth! or man or woman come forth!
You must not stay sleeping and dallying there in the house, though you built it, or though it has been built for you.
Out of the dark confinement! out from behind the screen! (Whitman)
Or better yet:
Follow the path to nirvana with a guide who knows the way. “I will make this my winter home, have another house for the monsoon, and dwell in a third during the summer.” Lost in such fancies, one forgets his final destination. (The Buddha)
And someone’s solemn duty it is to remind you (and strict liability if they don’t):
“There are going to be times,” says Kesey, “when we can’t wait for somebody. Now, you’re either on the bus or off the bus. If you’re on the bus, and you get left behind, then you’ll find it again. If you’re off the bus in the first place—then it won’t make a damn.” (Tom Wolfe)
It won’t make a damn and once everyone’s got their seatbelts on you really start moving and it might be something like this:
The magnificent car made the wind roar; it made the plains unfold like a roll of paper; it cast hot tar from itself with deference - an imperial boat. I opened my eyes to a fanning dawn; we were hurling up to it. Dean's rocky dogged face as ever bent over the dashlight with a bony purpose of its own. (Kerouac)
And then it’s your turn to take over the wheel for the midnight shift and:
All alone in the night I had my own thoughts and held the car to the white line in the holy road. (Kerouac)
And it’s great when you get there because you’ve seen it now and there’s so much more to see:
A man goes along thinking the world to be thus and so, simply because he has never been jolted out of the rut in which he crawls like a worm. (Henry Miller)
But the paradox is you never actually have to go anywhere, not to the Rio Grande and not to the next stop, you don’t have to move an inch:
Without stirring abroad
One can know the whole world;
Without looking out of the window
One can see the way of heaven.
The further one goes
The less one knows. (Lao Tzu)
And nothing lasts forever and time is a flat circle and goodbyes never leave you so don’t turn away a soul, even His Dread Highness. But you don’t know this yet and it’s on to the next and the next until you’re all cracked up on the highway — and even then, at the very end of all things, you’ve still got your junkyard angel:
Well, when the pipeline gets broken
And I'm lost on the river bridge
I’m all cracked up on the highway
And in the water’s edge
Here again she comes, down the thruway
Ready to sew me up with a thread
Well, if I go down dyin', you know
She’s bound to put a blanket on my bed. (Bob Dylan)
Part 2 coming soon…
It's all a journey: "Whatever happens happens, and maybe you’ll remember some of it, maybe you won’t." Or, as Art. A says in "Fear and Loathing (1998)—Just Say No?"
"It’s all about the journey and the story, not the destination."
https://moviewise.substack.com/p/fear-and-loathing-1998just-say-no
We're all tuned into the same movie 🤗
"But the paradox is you never actually have to go anywhere, not to the Rio Grande and not to the next stop, you don’t have to move an inch: Without stirring abroad | One can know the whole world; Without looking out of the window | One can see the way of heaven. (Lao Tzu)
Reading your latest dispatch, it never feels like the "end of the road". Loved this one, to be read, watched, listened to over and over, no rush to get to that blanket....