Clear Springs by Bobbie Ann Mason

Author:Bobbie Ann Mason [Mason, Bobbie Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-83024-1
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-11-13T16:00:00+00:00

Meanwhile, at home, my mother wrote me about the garden and the weather and broken machinery. She wrote, “You told about reading about that guy that built a cabin at a pond. Well, he didn’t have to raise a family and so he had time to write down things he saw. He had an education, so he should have been able to get somewhere. And you wrote in your letter about the environment, but don’t forget you can’t solve the whole world’s problems.”

Mama coped. She dealt with what was handed her. Yet I didn’t realize that I was behaving just like her. In my own style, I was subservient, bowing to authority. Yankee culture sat on me like the rocks Mama set on the lid of a pickle crock to hold the pickles down in the brine.

Still, I paddled bravely along in an uncertain current. I talked to a psychologist in West Hartford a few times. He said, “Don’t you feel somewhat disoriented, being so far from home?”

“Oh, no, not at all,” I insisted. I believed I was meant to be in New England, in Carolyn and John’s sophisticated world. I couldn’t live in the South, where so much ignorance and prejudice persisted. I thought he was suggesting I should go back home.

But when I told him about Carolyn and John, his response worked like a brain corrective, like electroshock.

“They sound shallow,” he said. “Why would you let them treat you that way?”

That was a revelation. I felt as if he’d given me a happy pill.

I was afraid of drugs, but the psychedelic revolution—mainly through music—was transforming everything around me, fracturing objects and ideas like a light show at a concert. The bizarre juxtapositions, loss of context, and random acts of hallucinogenic vision seemed familiar—that was my life. Rock-and-roll musicians were leading the way. Once again, as it had when I was a teenager, music grabbed me and shook me up with a vision of truth. Perceptions were shifting, precisely what I needed. I had to unlearn “supposed to” and “should ought to”—all fatalistic agricultural imperatives. Instead of making hay while the sun was shining, I had to see the sunshine. I needed to see as a child again. It became important to stop and gaze at a toad-frog as if it were the first one on the planet. A flower petal restored childhood’s magic; the infinitely reverberating sound of a sitar had an undertone of shifting colors, with the smell of patchouli; the spidery veins of glazed ceramics mapped inner landscapes. One night in my apartment some friends and I hopefully baked some banana peels and smoked them, taking our instructions from Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow.”

The counterculture saved me. I wasn’t really capable of sustained despair anyway. The world was too interesting, and I hadn’t truly lost my naive enthusiasm. I had already done things my grandparents could not have imagined. I had bought a Volkswagen at the factory in Wolfsburg, Germany, and driven it throughout Europe; I had joined a peace march in New York; I had seen the Beatles at Shea Stadium (both times, 1965 and 1966).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.