ARRANGEMENTS
Walking, weary, down the shadowed roads beneath Virginia hills at
fall of dusk. My nightly ritual after work-- sometimes
with my wife (our pact of nearly silent thought). Sometimes, as now, alone.
Again I let my gaze rest on “arrangements” of our neighbors’
living rooms. Emblazed to dazzling
focus as the darkness swells, binding me to them in deeper ways. These
folks I banter with when gardening, or swap quick nods when driving past.
As they lean midday from porches in their wooden rocking chairs, sipping
ice tea slow as breath in Appalachian heat.
But now I feel like secret words, or some regenerative hope, their
need to mold a portion of their lives, like art.
To decorate the hidden will.
Despite the constant flicker of those TV screens that lull most nights
into a common thought. Each nest
like a bold signature of brightly painted “Piedmont crafts” and
photographs of vanished kin, alive or not, whose distant spirits-- framed
in gold or cherry-- touch their hearts.
And some with items more obscure perched
along the thresholds or their hearths. Those rough-block hounds with grinning snouts and crazed wide
eyes, or gaping scarecrow-featured saints, of self-taught mountain “outsiders”
they purchase, on occasion, with that woodstove kindling trucked down dirt-cheap
to our valley in the fall’s first chill each year.
Carvings from split blocks of montane cherry, chestnut, oak, prized
black willow or sap-dried pine--carvings from the same trees as those cairnlike
piles left beside their doors, in leafless damp, that touch their sense of
place. For a few bucks more than firewood, they line their mantels
with crude figurines of rustic mountainfolk, often grouped to bow in “grace”
as if before a simple feast-- bright buttons, bottlecaps, or even their grown
daughters’ girlhood beads affixed into droll features of those gruff
faces of bark.
Or even stranger “visions’ by avowed wood-chopper prophets
now and then… Christ Crying “Quo vadis?”, forked arms
of wild cherry spread toward the glowing Blue-Ridge sky.
Or wedged beside the lumber in the flatbeds of old trucks, works equally
queer from the strong hands of zealous wives (who fathom their own trials
in the Bible’s soulful tales) . . . Baffled Hagar wandering under a dangling rubber ball of “fiery”
gold, grasping an unwanted babe in snaking arms of juniperroot, her gaze tear-bright
from eyes of broken glass. . .
Images through which our neighbors feel the vatic presence their region’s hands, if only seen by them and “God.” Visions gouged by those impassioned souls
who drop down on our quiet streets, like trolls emerging from the spirit of
these hills, just once a year. . . To
cast the spell of their quaint “art”--odd secrets shared--beside
those flickering TV sets that rarely douse, like haunting stories tapping
some deep vestige in the region’s heart. Sold with woodstove logs, for barely more.
So I walk each night, a displaced teacher from the North, to peer into
my Southern neighbors’ gleaming rooms of curios, both sacred and mundane,
in the valley called Spring Garden where we live beneath Virginia hills. What we’ve come to call that queer
“Museum of the Soul,” arranged by their TVs with some deep need.
And whether walking with her or alone, I feel my spirit lift each
time, despite fatigue, “in deeper ways.” Deeper even than the reason that I’d
journeyed from a suburb of Chicago, back a decade and a half, to teach here
in their region at a local Baptist college called Virginia Intermont.
That red-brick oasis of more worldly thought, within the church-bound
town of Bristol, it’s become over the years.
Where their children or their children’s kids, or sometimes older
relatives (curious but clinging resolutely to their “faith”) have
turned up in my classes now and then (some with touching eagerness to hear
remote ideas from their amusing “Midwest-walker” friend). And where I’m meant to comb their heartfelt poems for
cliches, or steep them for a while in the “philosophic books” of cultures other than
their own--the pure ideas of Socrates, the higher Brahman, or perhaps the earthly wisdom of the Tao. That puzzling array of “worlds”
beyond these hills they tolerate good-naturedly, with momentary interest intermixed
(alongside gentle invitations to the churches of their families) with always
fuller doubt. . .
But tonight, again, I feel that deeper nearness to our neighbors (somehow near as kin), imbued with
mountain lore that we both share, in different ways, and live beneath.
Each nest like a bold signature they’ve stroked into the darkness
just for me to “deeply” read and ponder while, each night, I wander
by-- that I deeply read to know them (and those other lives, from hereabouts, whose offerings
they know and feel upon their hearths and shelves)--
that I deeply read from darkened streets beneath these hills more closely
than those papers that I grade. Papers
based on “remote thoughts” their kin and children, trying, write
for me.
But tonight, again, I witness those “arrangements” touching
to our lives,
culled over those years (preserved in gold and cherry frames) their children
grew and left, their parents waned and died.
Arrangements touching to our lives, despite the flickering bluey glow
I also see each night. But do not feel.
Arrangements bound as close as pumping blood to each home’s heart. If only, in their own minds, seen by them and “God.”
Arrangements like the secret of “Quo vadis?”* shared, despite
the swamping mesmerism of the sit-coms and the game shows that pervades. Till sets flicked off, in rooms fraught
with their hopes and fears-- each witness to a deeper thought--beneath the
darkened Blue-ridge hills, we sleep.
Dan Stryk
*Greek for “Wither goest thou?”--the question posed to Jesus by both Simon Peter and Thomas before His ascension, and which He rhetorically repeats before rising, in lieu of clearly answering, suggesting that others may one day follow Him if their devotion to God, and concern for each other’s lives, persists. . .
--John 13.36, 14.5