Everyday Apocalypse by David Dark

Author:David Dark [David Dark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781441231703
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group

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SIX

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Boogie Nights of the Living Dead

The Moral Vision of Beck

He told her about the alligators; Angel, who had a fertile imagination too, added detail, color. Together on the stoop they hammered together a myth. Because it wasn’t born from fear of thunder, dreams, astonishment at how the crops kept dying after harvest and coming up again every spring, or anything else very permanent, only a temporary interest, a spur-of-the-moment tumescence, it was a myth rickety and transient as the bandstands and the sausage-pepper of Mulberry Street.

Thomas Pynchon, V.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

Gavin Stevens in William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun

A drifter came by offering to rake up the leaves in our yard for money. We agreed to it and were too busy to notice when, after making a pile or two, he left, money in hand, and never came around again. But our neighbor, ever vigilant, took in the whole thing. He’s an eighty-five-year-old African-American named Matthew Sherrill, and before we knew what had happened, he’d arranged for one of the men in his landscaping business to finish the job. Any attempt to repay Matthew for kindnesses unsought is always met with a lifted hand and the refrain: “We’re neighbors.” He provided the following assessment of our exchange with the runaway raker of leaves: “The world is filled with cruel-hearted people who’ll take your kindness for weakness.”

Language like this makes me feel like Matthew is a storehouse of ancient wisdom. I thanked him for putting it so well and he thanked me for thanking him. He’ll often pepper his conversation with phrases from the King James Bible in the most unself-conscious way imaginable, and it gets me thinking about oral tradition, wisdom as opposed to information, and why it is that speaking so poetically comes so unnaturally to the likes of me, a thirty-two-year-old white schoolteacher. After he left our front porch, I went over to our CD collection to see if I couldn’t find something to keep my head and heart submerged in rusty old truths.

As much as I hate to admit it, I haven’t yet attained the level of spiritual development necessary to be the kind of person who listens to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music exclusively for pleasure, though my faith does have me confident that I’ll get their eventually. Tom Waits had already filled the house in recent days, and neither Dylan nor Cash would do it this time, because, to tell the truth, I needed a peer, someone who knows that the only thing to do with a wise neighbor is to listen and take notes and ask for orders. I also wanted someone whose cultural inheritance includes, for better or worse, images from Hanna Barbera cartoons and the blessed sounds of an Atari 2600; someone, too, who might find themselves moved and inspired by the sound of my neighbor’s voice while wary of the murdering sentimentality that’s never known quite how to talk about these things.

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