Reading Local Seattle

{ Slaughter }

[ A Time Before Slaughter | Paul Nelson | Apprentice House | $12.95 ] Ten thousand years ago the area that is now Auburn, Washington, was still dripping with the final melting of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet. As drainage from the deglaciated alpine valleys in the Cascade range flowed southward along jagged ice margins and coalesced into meltwater streams that bounced and burbled over a broad moraine of basal till in the lowlands, a deposition of parent material developed into a topsoil of amazing fertility. Forests of western hemlock, Douglas-fir, western red cedar, western white pine and lodgepole pine appeared, shading a rich understory of swordfern, devilsclub, vine maple, western yew, oceanspray, salal and skunk cabbage. Marshy habitats supported a diverse population of raccoon, mink, river otter, muskrat and beaver. Deer, elk, black bear, coyote, mountain lion and bobcat leaped, slept, prowled and hunted the valleys and slopes. Into this teeming array of post-glacial life the first human inhabitants arrived, having descended southward from the Bering Sea land bridge connecting North America to Siberia. They would form a culture in equilibrium with this environment that would last for thousands of years, knit together by a language called Lushootseed, or Whulshootseed, otherwise known as the Salish language system. This is the time before Slaughter, the subject embedded in the title of Paul Nelson’s collection of poetry. Slaughter comes later.

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{ Time is not a stiff tick }

YouTubia is neither a utopia or geographical location but a portal through time. In essence, a cue, a prompt, a provocation that stirs a memory so vivid and enveloping it constitutes a location, a cleft in the topologies of time. For Proust it was a madeleine soaked in tea; for me, it is a tiny screen of pixels, Red Skelton bouncing up and down in a crowd of screaming girls while a young Mick Jagger sings “Tell Me” with the Rolling Stones in the lobby of the London Palladium September 22nd, 1964. The emotion is palpable. The separation of 45 years melts away. I want to grow my hair long. I want to walk on the wild side and write explosive dangerous poetry like Arthur Rimbaud and Gregory Corso and Bob Kaufman and Allen Ginsberg. I want to push boundaries and open the doors of perception, wide. I want to devote my life to art and poetry and go to England and visit the house where Keats wrote “Ode To A Nightingale” and watched coal deliveries and ate nectarines and met Fanny Brawne. The song gives me all those feelings anew, fresh, vigorous, unqualified. Nothing limps. Nothing balks. Everything is limitless. This is not the slow controlled glide of mature, later life, but the reckless energy of youth, before any seeds have been planted, before any ships have sailed, before any struggles and disappointments have denatured and tamed that feeling. The surprise of seeing the very young, incipient Stones exactly as they appeared on TV in 1964 with their peculiar blend of English Romanticism, raffish libertinism, and the electric blues of Chicago’s Southside brought the strength and purity of that original feeling back to me. Did it last? No, of course not. A 61 year-old man cavorting about like a shaggy teenager would quickly swerve into buffoonery. Age has done much to enrich and undermine the Stones after 40 odd years of almost relentless performance. But a lesson was learned.

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Not right, not right at all.

I hate it when people call me judgmental. The implication is twofold: that I have the arrogance to believe that I know all things, and that I suffer from a narrowness of mind. Consequently, any and all opinions that I express are corrupt and irresponsible. It is pointless to continue the argument. Once your authority is undermined  you have no place in an argument. What is laughably ironic about this is that the person who has accused you of being judgmental is being judgmental. If everyone is blind, who can discern the one person who can see?

The opposite of being judgmental is being open-minded. This does not mean that you are unencumbered by judgment. It means that you have the capacity to suspend judgment and consider things from another point of view. It is a grand luxury if there is no other pressing business. But if you have to decide whether to get a heart operation or not, send a troop of men into battle, or step in to stop a fight you do not have the luxury of endlessly unraveling the ramifications, à la Hamlet. You have to act, and act quickly.

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Leagues weirder than these people.

Identity is a mysterious and cumbersome business. No one truly finds out who they are because we are continually changing. Literally: hair, size, weight, age, gonads, wrinkles, tattoos, and the baptism of daily experience continually change. Everything right down to one’s hormones and cuticles is in constant change. Literature is full of this. It is a primary theme. Transformation is the pivot about which many narratives turn.

I was fortunate to grow up during a time when the collective identity of American youth was going through a change of astronomical proportions. The traditional roles of the staid Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It To Beaver, and Father Knows Best variety had been discarded. Young people wanted something different from life than serenity and moderation. No one was sure what they wanted or who they really wanted to be or even if being someone were really all that attractive to begin with. Maybe it was better to lose oneself in Europe or India in a quest for the ultimate “elsewhere“. There were mythologies available for these ruptures called albums. Rock groups held the key to the most adventuresome personal narratives possible.

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