them crooked rivers
In praise of collected curio, textiles, music, and nature all in their most inefficient ways.
I don’t like to think of myself as superstitious but of course that means I am the most susceptible, it seeps in secretly. I collect curio from my travels; trinkets, beads, rock and cloth, and a gathering of magic hodge-podge, all stashed in my mojo bag. I am a child of divorced parents, and when the times were tough and my sense of home was scattered in the pieces of my teenage life, I held tightly to a small carpet the size of a bathmat. The idea came to me from the Kevin Costner classic Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves movie. Morgan Freeman's character Azeem carries his carpet to use for prayer as he faced towards Mecca. I thought it was a wonderfully simple and elegant idea of a movable home, a small cut of cloth to signify an idea and place. My small carpet turned into a number of trinkets that float with me while I travel, things that remind me of roots and routine, but also hold my superstitious metaphysics. Beads from the Himalaya and Central Asian deserts, old postcards, a vintage compass, things related to time, space, and prayer. These things glean a vibe, they hold some sort of power, at least to me, the non-superstitious believer.
Music holds the similar space in my brain. In the same way counting prayer beads can induce a trance, a song can transport and meditate. This is no original idea, this is ancient workings, innate human beliefs of repetition and vibration. In Cuba, the syncopated pulse of the rumba is, by design, intended to create a certain feeling, a certain trance, and used to communicate with deities through a rhythmic language (Santeria and Orisha religions use this way to enter the temple). In South and Central Asia, the melodic framework of a Raga is composed to heal physical and spiritual ailments. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was famous for the vibrations he could create with his voice and Raga’s. In Morocco the Gnawa musical rituals create a frenzy and a letting go in a rhythmic repetition and beat that allow for ecstasy in the believer. I am reminded of anthropologist Wade Davis quoting a friend saying "Europeans go to church and speak about God, we dance in the temple and become God."
We can feel this collective effervescence on those rare nights when a performer or band is in the zone and the weather and stars are all aligned, and the chills we feel in the crowd as an artist transcends; our faces are melted off with the sweet sounds of rock and roll. Jeff Buckley signing “Mojo Pin” live at Gleneagles (a fan of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan himself), Dr Nina Simone at Montreux in 76, The Who slaying the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, Fiona Apple singing the Whole of the Moon, or Sly & the Family Stone at Woodstock.
Textiles can hold these qualities as well, like songs and mojo bags. In Peru, the Quechua weave sacred threads in a pattern of pulses and waves for certain Apu (mountain spirits) offerings. The Quilts of Gee’s Bend in Alabama hold history and context in the choice of color and cloth, and have wonderfully imperfect lines between the cuts that give their quality a grown or organic feel.
For a few weeks in the summer of 1989, the movie “Gleaming the Cube” held my attention. It was a wonderfully 80’s skateboarding movie starring Christian Slater, Tony Hawk and Tommy Guerrero. The title coming from a niche slang idea, in part birthed by Stacy Peralta (himself a famed skater and skating technical advisor for the film), that when you are in the zone on a skateboard, and focused, all time and space slip away and you are in a state of otherness, you are then said to be gleaming the cube. That summer in 89, if you had gone to your local VHS rental store and taken home a copy of this film, and you watched it as many times as waking hours would allow in the 2 nights you rented it, then you might have realized at the end of the credits, before the tape ran out, there was a little extra video that would pop up. The colloquial term for this on a VHS or a DVD was an “easter egg” or “bonus track”. The video was a few minutes of short cuts on why the film was called what it was:
Gleaming the cube, for me, can be found on long haul flights over oceans at night, it can be found on a bike ride or a long walk in the wood, I feel it when I teach and lecture, time slips away and warps and I am out of any exact place. There is something related to time with it for sure, I am just not sure what, but when we are in this state, time is slow and long or not present at all. It is a daydream, a venture in a slipstream. I have felt it surfing on the green of a wave, and I am sure, had I learned how to properly, it could have been found on the back of a skateboard.
The objects I collect contain a part of this feeling, either in their making or in the way they represent something gleamed in the cube. A compass, a watch, a necklace used for meditation and pace; rhythmic spiritual tools, usually trinkets that are hand made or used with intent and love.
Years ago I worked at a summer camp in southern Appalachia. Weekly I would sneak off the property and head to a small Chevron gas station near the camp entrance. In the southern states a gas station can be many things in addition to a place to purchase gas. They can be Michelin star meals of fried fish or chicken, they can be casino’s, and grocery stores, they are crossroad markets and in the mythos of the south a crossroad is where magic happens, you can sell your soul to the devil in order to play guitar like a god. This particular gas station sold biscuits out the back and was called “Linda’s Food Mart”. In my memory (which is faulty) Linda wore her hair in a netted beehive and had an arthritic hand that would warp the dough, and a one armed friend or husband or relative that would sit next to her and chain smoke Marlboro reds all day. I swear, some sort of mixture of her hand and hairspray and smoke worked its way into the flour and water to create a biscuit I still dream about. Linda, when kneading dough, was most definitely gleaming the cube. No amount of artificial creation or generating can include the individual foibles and strangeness of the human condition. Chat GPT can't do it, nor can anything wanting to replicate this over and over and over again on a mass industrial scale. It is of a particular time and place and person, and that is what makes it beautiful.
This is the value of the trinkets I cary, and the art I am attracted to, and why I travel. I fear we are forgetting to allow for chaos and spontaneity in our voyaging, with the streamlining of apps and platforms to curate our adventures into the precise pre-concieved ideas we have and expect before we leave our homes. There are companies out there that promise wow moments daily on your travels. This is how far we have come; from being open enough to be wowed just by the world as it is, and it is wow worthy, a loss of the capacity for amazement, to desiring some pre-set wow to occur, a saccharine stand in for actual human spontaneous joy.
Perhaps that’s what all this is, a praise for the imperfections and humanness of the rustic crooked world and damned be the strait lined efficient and process driven, there is no room in life for over-efficiency. I want things driven by passion not process. I celebrate and worship the inefficient; them crooked rivers that meander in their wild landscapes, the scattered pattern of Gee’s Bend quilts, the way certain ancient neighborhoods have alleyways that morph and shift to the lived history they have been created by, my mojo bag and the way Jeff Buckly’s voice undulates as he sings and screams his song “Mojo Pin.”
