What’s on Jim’s Mind (Issue #197)
We’ve been back in the States for just a little over a week now…
I almost said, “been home”, but then I had to catch myself as I came to the realization that at least for this moment in time and space, and in so many ways, this country that I am returning to feels less like home than the places Barbara and I have been visiting for these past few weeks. Only one of the places we went to was completely new to us: the Yorkshire Dales. Barbara and I both love to travel, but we each have our own ways, left to our own devices, about going about it. As my dad used to say about my near compulsory need to read all the credits at the end of each television show (my favorite was The Lone Ranger, where the rolling script of who played and what, and where it was filmed, always had to time our perfectly to an instrumental reprise of The William Tell Overture, and, of course, Cliff Edwards’ (Jiminy Cricket) beautiful and somewhat melancholy version of When You Wish Upon a Star from the soundtrack of Walt Disney’s Pinocchio. When You Wish Upon a Star makes, no difference who you are, when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true; it carried a profound and personal message to me, telling me that I could escape the confines of the rather puritanical and confined small Midwestern town where I grew up and find the life I wanted to have, in places like New York City, and London or maybe on a ranch like Gene Autry’s.
Sorry about that little digression. I hope it means something to at least some of you as well. I’ll return to Dad, who, as I started to say before I interrupted myself, would frequently admonish me as I watched those credits rolling with the words, “Let’s go. The program’s over. You always want to squeeze the last drop out of everything.”
Yes, Dad, and I still do, which is why Barbara and I have now made thirty-plus trips to London and fifteen to Berlin. I have not even begun to squeeze out that last drop from either place. The blessing of traveling with Barbara: while joyously indulging me, she also insists on adding new destinations- Australia a year ago, Mexico City (where we saw Diego Rivera’s reproduction of the incredible mural he painted for the lobby of the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center and was never seen by the public in New York due to the fact that the Rockefellers ordered it sandblasted off the wall because it contained a bust of Lenin.) Some say the reproduction is nowhere as good as the original Rockefeller Center version. If that’s the case, it must have been some mural, for the Mexico City version leaves you speechless. It was the first thing we ventured out of our hotel to see in Mexico City; we stayed for two hours and then came back for another hour’s look the next day. Thank you so much, Barbara, for occasionally getting me to stop watching the end credits and move on to a new show on another channel.
This summer’s new channel was the Yorkshire Dales. The train going over the trestle that began my letter today is a photo I took last week there. Let me, or rather one of my literary heroes, Bill Bryson, tell you about it.
The Settle-to-Carlisle line is perhaps the most celebrated obscure line in the world. British Rail has been wanting to close it down for years on the grounds that it doesn’t pay its way. This preposterous idea, that things must pay their way or be dispensed with, is perhaps the most intractable legacy of the Thatcher years, so much so that it has become received wisdom even among many liberals. But when you think about it for even a nanosecond, it is perfectly obvious that most worthwhile things don’t begin to pay for themselves. If you followed this absurd logic any distance at all, you would have to get rid of traffic lights, schools, drains, national parks, museums, universities, old people, and much else besides. So why on earth should something as useful as a railway line, which is generally much more agreeable than old people, and certainly less inclined to bitch and twitter, have to be economically viable to ensure its continued existence? This is a line of thinking that must be abandoned at once.
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Bryson wrote these words in 1995, when he was preparing to return to his native United States for a few years. What he referred to then as “absurd logic” now feels increasingly the accepted norm, at least in the US.
I’ve been trying to write this letter for five days now, but just as I feel I’m getting a handle on it, some new act of “Absurd Logic” seems to burst forth, sending me reeling back to square one. The governor of Florida doesn’t like state funds to be spent on an arts festival that features Drag Acts. That is no problem. We can fix that by banning state money from being spent on any arts programming, including PBS and NPR. The attempted murder of candidate Trump, dropping of all charges in the Florida Documents case. It has not been a good week.
But as I think back about our time in the Dales and on an amazing exhibit we saw at the Deutsches History MA museum, which examined critical moments from German history over the last century, some in which great tragedies occurred and others when and how it was averted. An exhibit at the Tate Modern: Expressionists Kandinsky, Munter, and the Blue Rider and its the story of friendships that made modern art at a quieter time be our backyard, Noel Coward’s one-act plays Suite in Three Keys at the Orange Tree Theatre on the outskirts in London, a moving play by Ramba Zamba Theatre Company in Berlin. Yerma at the Schaubuhne.
I also feel inspired.
Times are bad here in the States, where I live, but am no longer sure is home.
But at least for now, life goes on. And amidst the depression, I feel and fight daily; I am inspired by friends here and the garden we have created in what used to be our backyard. Swinging in the evening on our old-fashioned front porch, dare I say it is home. Couple that with what I have found once again in the larger world that feeds my curiosity and my knowledge (and new ideas for our garden and my need to keep going I remember the words I heard on an obscure travel show that sometimes airs rather spontaneously in Pittsburgh when another program doesn’t fill its full-time allotment
“Travel is much more than going and coming back.”
– Jim Niesen
Write to me directly at jim@irondale.org
