I am going to try and transcribe this from my journal from two weeks ago. To set the scene, imagine me on a hot train through the woods of New England down to NYC, reading John Steinbeck’s “Travels With Charley Across America,” preparing to see Robert Glasper the next night.
“I’m just passing through a trailer park…Steinbeck would have spit in the dirt. There is a van half submerged in a swamp, completely rusted out.
I wonder about constructing all these details of life into a narrative. We want to draw morals and conclusions from everything, even from the simplest observations; we try to weave everythign together into one big, summarizable, comprehendable sotry - we cram it into a frame too small. Life isn’t meant to be understood, it’s meant to be lived. There is no absolute meaning to spring or moral to junkyards (passing one now) - they just are, they just are their own beauty, and they do not require our comprehension.
Life does not ahve themes. Life is not a narrative. Meaning is read into life, not read out of it; there is no objective anything because we are all subjective. That’s what was incredible about On The Road: there is no meaning of life except to live and be glad to be alive, to revel and BE. Meaning is a human thing; morals, narratives, these are not natural.
Maybe later I will organize this more, or at least just revise it into some sort of paragraph. I have to eat now.
Listening - Brad Mehldau: Places
1 response so far ↓
1 Monty Ogden (mogden09) // Apr 30, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Where does observation of human activity fit in to this? I don’t necessarily object to your frustrations about human tendency to project, but there is something to be said for reflection, particularly regarding human relationships. Stories, it seems to me, can achieve that better than most mediums. As for narrative reflection on the surrounding world, that is, separate from purely human experience, if we approach a text with the understanding that an author’s own moral sense may work it’s way into the piece, approach it with a kind of level-headed suspicion, we might just discover some bit of truth we would have otherwise missed. I’m going to go read a book.
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