C. Synthesis

[From White Buffalo; The Story of a Mayan Prince & Others; Paul Joseph McLean Among the Scholars of War; Frontispiece; 1990]

CODA
By Ezra Pound
O my songs
Why do you look eagerly and curiously into people’s faces
Will you find your lost dead among them?

Were J.P. and I similarly predisposed? It’s hard to be sure, especially after four decades. We naturally recognized in each other a longing for freedom that the road seemed capable of delivering then, which, by the by, seems endangered, if not extinct, in 2026. Did we take it too far? I’ve always thought JP was more the pragmatist, in Vans or loafers and a tie. Who’s to say! Fuck, I thought that was the point, to take it to the limit (Eagles)! The American interpretation of carpe diem relied on cash, a Rand McNally atlas, and the Boss (Nebraska, but his whole catalog, plus a hundred other great songs, albums, bands, artists). Lucky for us, back in the day, you could ramble on the cheap, if you were not adverse to periodic situational discomforts (e.g., out of money, sleeping on the floor in a dingy basement under somebody else’s coat) and the odd, gritty egalitarianism economy travel occasionally demands (…with three strangers). In my case, alcoholism consistently skewed outcomes, and not favorably. Now, I do recognize the the questionable accuracy of my rearward gaze and assessments. How reliable is my eyewitness testimony, forty years after the fact, post-stroke, peering through the warped lens of my tenuous perceptual apparatus? Fairly early in recovery, I was forced to admit that I’d lost the ability to discern between truth and falsehood. Has that ability regenerated over the past three and a half decades, like a salamander’s tail? To which I would say, at least to my own satisfaction, I’m on on pretty solid ground, truth-wise. I can at minimum assure you I’ll do my level best to not pull your leg, hoodwink you or steer you wrong. That, at a juncture in which blurring the line between fact and fiction has never been more commonplace. I could finger the prevariagator-in-chief (ew), but the BS that dude spews day in and day out (Joy Division) obliterates the curve then.What is the truthiness gold standard today, anyway? Wait! Don’t reply: we might risk jettisoning reason altogether, if we started agreeing on the obviously real; the crisis of veracity is hardly an academic literary abstraction, early in the second quarter of the 21st Century. It is literally a sign of civilization melting down, like the reactor at Chernobyl. To summarize, I’m not going for photorealism here, not trompe l’oeil, not brut, or any aesthetic pushing harsh objectivity or clever illusion as deception, cushy sentimentality as camouflage for nasty intentions and/or predatory malevolence, subversive or subliminal messaging, or straightforward ugliness as provocation or flaunting the lack of meaningful constraints. Nope. I wouldn’t want to give Plato an excuse to boot me out of his Republic, not that he would know art. even if it cracked him in his skull like a 2x4.

I’ve devoted a lifetime to investigating the Road Man thoroughly, if not objectively, as a dimensional phenomenon. I’ve gathered enough anecdotal data to form rhizomatic theories about it, sufficient to mold a curriculum on it, to subjectivivize it. In so doing I can deduce that to wanderlust is inherently human, even though one person won’t feel the drive as keenly as another, for any number of reasons. As such, virtually all cultures produce exemplar representations, stories, images, songs, that describe, perform or depict their precise paradigm of wandering. Our (humanity’s) expressive diversity on this theme is indeed remarkable, and our appetite for Road-urge-related content is practically inexhaustible. It has many names: e.g., the Path or Way; Quest; usually presenting and perpetuated as Gesamtkunstwerk; it’s all-direction scalable — reducible to the individual or expansive, encompassing what we call world-building; historical, as per migrations of peoples; or more abstractly, applicable to movements, in the political sense. I would argue this universal Road fixation/fascination is as fundamental to human nature as love itself, and as strong as our idea of home, the wish to belong someplace, and to know that place is where you will always belong. The dream of Paradise as destination at the journey’s end hinges on the traveler’s survival of a myriad of threats and dangers. We need roots, but dwell on rootlessness, and are torn between the fixed pole of stasis, and the idealization of endless, constant motion. We perpetually mourn that which is lost or left behind, and with matching indulgence, fantasize about the horizon’s imagined promise, which rarely meets or exceeds our lofty expectations.