America is young, and not as old as some think. I’m walking around Farmville and I see a building that was made in 1921. It looks kind of like a castle, though not at all like a castle and it’s dark outside and with the fog hanging over the town and the aura this building has, I get the feeling that it has seen it all. It reminds me of when I was in high school, in Stuttgart, and there were buildings in the neighboring towns of Vaihingen, Tubingen and Esslingen that were built in the 1500s long before this country was born. Europe’s dead, I think. Everything’s about the past, people come to see the ancient ruins of Rome and the famous cemetery in France (I forget the name) where geniuses like Jim Morrison are buried. America is alive, a Bouillabaisse! Where else in the world could you cross the road from little Italy and walk right into the frenzy that is Harlem, and then drive cross-country to San Francisco to experience the booming Asian streets. It’s all here. Foreigners come here because it’s exciting and they wanna know what gonna happen, because if anything’s going to happen, it’s gonna start right here, is what they say. There’s an energy, a rush, that can be felt coast to coast, time before and time after, from the New York Bowery in the 1950s where drunks and vagrants slept in gutters, to the dry streets of Temecula, California where I went to middle school. It’s the conscious American state and we are all apart of it.
I’m in the library and I see this townie who hangs around all day, everyday, August to May. He reminds me of Terry Malloy, he does. Do you know Terry Malloy? It’s the way he carries himself, shoulders high like a cat ready to pounce on the ghoul, who with one condescending glance is robbing him of his soul. You can see it in his eyes, dark, haunted by dreams of “I coulda,’ I shoulda,’ I woulda’ if I hadn’t met her and had those kids I mighta’ BEEN somebody!” I know seeing this degenerate man wallowing in his lost American Dream will forever change my life. It’s the conscience! I’m telling you! We are all one conscience, Zen, like William Blake, when he wrote that poem about when one person is miserable we all feel that pain.
That’s America right there, one conscience, each individual is one fraction, one piece, of a mass, godlike, inner voice that speaks the language of this country. Everyone is being influenced by how everyone else lives in what we do, say and think. And when we die we are not the Hollow Men like Eliot said. We are America in its purest form, the soil where all life grows.
