A Country Rag--Gas Lamps & Cobblestones

A Country Rag Gas Lamps & Cobblestones

graphic: photos by Gary Gerhart -- Main Street

Jonesborough, like many Appalachian towns, encourages creative endeavor through many venues -- museums, of course, but also smaller exhibition galleries, shopping center displays, restaurants, taverns and coffee shops, many of which have an "open mic" night monthly or weekly. Here, the place to try out your latest wall-or-table visual, musical composition, or literary exploration is Tweech 'N Jeeters (that's "twitch and jitters" for anglo-aliens unfamiliar with mountain dialect and inflection), the local brewery of distinctive java prepared and served with magazines, books, newspapers, and various philosophies by its doctor (that's PhD, Hawaii)/proprietor. On a recent Thursday evening, Creation filtered out betwixt acoustic duos (guitar and bass), poetry readings, singings, storytellings, and ... more guitar. Well, it's Tennessee, home of country music, and we nearly all play guitar, or something stringed, because it travels well, and we are a little footloose but need our choral things.

"The place where you came from ain't there any more, and where you had in mind to go is canceled out." -- Where are you going, where have you been?, Joyce Carol Oates

CREATION by Jeannette Harris

In the beginning there was an amoeba, and it said:
I want to be bigger.
So it thought and figured and thought and puzzled and finally figured what to do.
It ate and ate to capacity until it stressed and stretched and grew.
Then it ate and ate to capacity again until it grew some more.
Finally the amoeba was a very large, kind of squishy, sort of round thingamajig.
And the ocean said:
What is THAT?
So the amoeba thought and figured and puzzled and finally thought what to do.
It rolled and rolled in seashell bits on the ocean floor that stuck to its gelatin coating like glue.
And the ocean said:
HEY, what are you?
So the amoeba puzzled and figured and thought and bounced on the ocean floor until it puzzled what to do.
It rammed and rammed one end of its gluey gelatinous goo over and over into the ocean floor.
And the ocean floor said:
Ouch, what are you trying to do?
The amoeba opened the hole it had rammed into one end of its gooey gelatinous glue and hissed:
The heck with this, I'm leaving you.
The ocean rolled its belly in waters of laughter that flooded something later called land and roared:
How, you floating goo?
So the amoeba collapsed into the sand, and it thought and puzzled and figured till it knew exactly what to do.
It found twin rocks on the ocean floor to cuddle up next to, ate some mud and threw up glue, and attached the tandem stones. Then it snorted:
Step aside, I'm walking through.
So the waves parted for something that might by puzzle and figure and thought someday become someone that might be called a man living on something that might be called the land.
And the ocean bowed and provided him food because only it knew what roiling cells had given birth to.
And the amoeba said:
I feel better now.

"The principles and foundations of the ‘creative life force’ can be clearly seen depicted in the tree of life of the Kabbalah, and in a very similar way as the subtle energy system of ancient Yogic tradition. This tree of life is virtually a map of the evolutionary process with three vertical columns or channels (like a tree trunk) and seven major energy centres or chakras (like tree branches).... The first chakra at the base of the spine represents the qualities of innocence and wisdom and provides life force to organs of reproduction and excretion. This chakra as an evolutionary milestone represents the earliest life forms, single celled amoeba which basically only needed to metabolise, excrete and reproduce." -- Knowledge of Reality (http://www.sol.com.au/kor/) Issue 16

Other legendary, sometimes extinct, creatures haunt our hills and nights. An Appalachian storyteller from Cherokee lands and thereabouts reports on the once-revered Clue Bird: "It flies 150 miles per hour and is given to making sudden right-angle turns and flying straight into the ground. They have bodies like cranes with exceptionally long bills. After they are embedded up to their eyes in the ground, they slowly elevate their bodies straight up and then their bodies begin to turn slowly sorta like a ferris wheel and the bird then plays a beautiful melody from its rectum. They have vanished now due largely to the harsh treatment they received by mill owners who captured them and taught them to play their melody for shift changes at the mill. In some states they were called the Milamor Bird because, when they played you could hear them for ...yeah, a mile or more." Gary Carden has been compiling for publication a descriptive archive of this and other little-known, fantastic spirits.