This passage made me particularly giddy:

“To gather the material for this book I interviewed dozens of Athens’ current and erstwhile citizens. The result of that effort was hundreds of  hours of oral history. Much of it was useful and insightful; most of it was glorified myth, or vague and confused renditions of overheard stories passed off as eyewitness accounts, the legends repeated so often that the storytellers finally convinced themselves they were really there. I have taken that stuff and spiked it with my own remembrances of living there from 1977 to 1987. What I ended up with is an overview history of the new music bands that started in Athens, beginning with The B-52′s. In the course of telling that history, I have also tried to recreate the feeling of living in a small hick Georgia college town in those fast and frantic first years after punk.

“The result of all this tale-telling is folklore, documented gossip. It’s a yarn like what you’d hear if you sat up late in some Athens kitchen talking with old friends about the past. Some folks might tell the story differently , but this how I heard it.”

This is a breathtakingly exciting vision of what history can be when we let go of the illogical and arrogant notion of it. Brown is refusing–refreshingly so–to pawn his book off as a facsimile of the past. Of course no such facsimiles ever exist, and we deal not in History, but in histories. Historians often want to hide that we’re dealing with multiple variations on events with different heroes and villains depending on who you talk to and the amount of skin that they’ve got in the game.

Brown’s preface is an alluring invitation precisely because it’s own view of itself is so sober and doesn’t condescend by pretending to tell us this is a record of “what really happened.” I’ll end with a quote that Brown reminded me of from one of my true intellectual heroes, the great historiographer Walter Benjamin. For Benjamin, the “historical materialists” are the good guys and the “historicists” are the delusional or deceptive ones hung up on thinking they can recreate the past:

A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.

I think Walter Benjamin would have liked Rodger Lyle Brown.

Walter Benjamin. Just changing history.

What did the brain of St. Matthew feel like as he wrote about the world swirling in to swallow him? Perhaps he woke up one morning and found that he had pieced it all together in his sleep. That the breezy fingers of a gentle and wild God had quietly entered his mind and rearranged the law he learned growing up–the law of his fathers before him. An accident of the subconscious or the intention of God. And maybe he realized that indeed they were always the same. He was invited into the circle of prophets and artist with the single realization that whatever comes next always manages to undermine expectations. The foolishness of it all was not proof; it was the reason it had to be written. Its folly was its reward. Preparation was sacrifice itself, and sacrifice was now the feast. Writing this was not a choice but a charge of the irrational wild heart that he met that morning.  His only companion in writing was the angst that his fingers would not move fast enough to repeat the details before it all swirled past and the world was ordinary again.

I was seduced into the Romantic life by uncles with wild cigarette grins, who smelled of whiskey and covert meetings with dark-skinned women who I’ll never meet. They came to family reunions a little drunk, often dozed in church, argued theology late into the night. They smoked together on the edge of my grandmother’s pond, talking of roofing jobs they were behind on,  mending stories of where they were the night before so that they didn’t hurt all the women who nurtured them.

They let me in a little bit to their world, recognizing a kinship in a seven-year-old, who likewise felt seared by the light at sundown, betrayed by the days that passed by so mercilessly.  At last, they thought, another one straddling two worlds like us.

Uncle Bill was the oldest. Once handsome, he had grown fat from drinking, stopping every night at the bar on his way home from work to avoid seeing Aunt Cecil.  He was still handsome, still with the Dean Martin half smirk, but it was worn down, under a beard now growing grey that he kept neat and trimmed. He kept his cuticles clean, always a comb in his front pocket

He taught me that a line of words in the most difficult thing to carve out in this world, something impossible to find without feeling like you’ve betrayed yourself the moment that they fly out of your hands like black shriveling doves.

I still have those records, but now Levon Helm is dead, and that means something.

When I heard a radio tribute to him, I decided to sleep all afternoon. I wanted to get drunk and find a swamp to swim across.  It took me out of the mood for writing a tribute, and I guess I still don’t feel much like writing one, so this is something other than that.

Regardless who the real man was, Levon Helm has meant pure swing, pulse, and joy. That name meant playing a game of cutthroat at a scratched up pool table, ordering another pitcher from the shittiest dive bar you can find, and floating down Cripple Creek and forgetting–for a few hours at least–that you have to sober up tomorrow to drive to a dull office building in Chino Hills, to type out words that mean nothing.

I hope that I am not a critic. Levon Helm was not a critic, he didn’t seem to know about gimmicks. I am getting sentimental, but that’s a defense mechanism. All I feel for Levon is envy for a life of love, a life well lived, and now just a growing desire to find my song, my pulse and joy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOi45FFfjG0

I enjoy this etymological tidbit because it throws “genius” into the light of surrender, rather than self-assertion. There is something darker, more seductive to life, when we think of genius as a person particularly in touch with that spirit. Genius, in this more essential sense, is the belief that those leaders, those guiding lights to humanity the those who hear whispers of their attendant spirits. This is not merely “genius” that contains a predisposition to exceptional smartness, something that separates the clever from the rest of us, but rather, the one who gives way to these silent divine urgings. It’s surprising that this earliest sense of the word pointed to such a democratic notion: “every person” had access to from the day of his or her birth

The primacy of the individual access to the divine, which we see rooted in this definition of genius, resurfaces in particularly powerful ways throughout the American experience. Before national independence even, America provided the soil for radicals of the spirit. Anne Hutchinson insisted that she heard the voice of God privately; John Winthrop exiled her from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for her brazen insistence on private access to the divine. George Whitefield less than a hundred years later, caused a similar stir, pulling people out of the church building and into tents he set up in the wilderness, preaching like people had never heard. He made the Bible stories about him, and about the people sweating in the tents. This primacy of the individual access to the spirit paved the way for political independence.

This certainly isn’t always good. There must be discernment; of course, we cannot trust everyone who insists they hear the voice of God. It’s only a short-step from Hutchinson and Whitefield to the delusion of American exceptionalism–where every child is a mixture between Albert Einstein and Jesus Christ. However, this is the violent swing of the pendulum, but it does not do away with the idea that we all have access to the divine. There is an essential possibility for genius that comes with being human, that guide that leads us through this version of death that we call “life”. And rather than exceptionalism, perhaps those who earn the title genius should be the ones who were not able just to act, but also to discern the urgings of those quietly whispering angels.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogYDUmIigw0

Treadwell mystifies us: at once, we see a portrait of a troubled man–a former addict with a failed acting career, carrying deep anger–and a spiritual healer fulfilling his dream of living with grizzlies in the wilds of Alaska. He maintains a religious reverence for the bears, and he never harms them, instead deterring them with makeshift karate moves. They are mesmerizing to watch, if a little discomforting. He calls himself the gentle warrior. He follows this love for the bears that gave his life meaning to his death, being massacred by one particular bear that never felt comfortable with Treadwell’s presence in the habitat. He was accompanied by his lover, who, even against Treadwell’s pleas that she leave him and save her own life, she refuses to abandon him. She seems to have loved him as much as he loved the bears. It is this unshakable love that makes Timothy’s death all the more tragic and enduring. Indeed, he wouldn’t have had it any other way. As one interviewee states during Herzog’s documentary, he would have been deeply saddened that the bear that killed him was also killed, and I imagine that even when being eaten alive, he never faulted the bear, but rather the bogeyman of the state that failed to protect them both. Whether or not we classify Treadwell as a hero, we can certainly say he was a man of faith. His faith was strangely personal, and like all great faiths, beyond reason and definition. But the tangled human mess of it, led him toward the restorative power of nature (particularly the majestic bears) which brought meaning and
purpose to an otherwise broken and misplaced life.

In addition to interviewing Treadwell’s friends and fellow activists, Herzog also gives voice to those suspicious of the man’s behavior, including ecologists, park rangers, coroners, some calling him “insane,” “misguided,” or even “mentally retarded.” These evaluations invite us to see something more troubling about Treadwell’s freedom. I think there is a way to move beyond evaluative judgments about whether Treadwell’s actions were ultimately good or bad, to see that Grizzly Man gives us a vision of complex heroism that is hard to come by. I don’t suggest the word “hero” in terms of adding up his actions into a positive and negative column reckon his life against an ultimate imagined social good or evil. Treadwell is too complex of a figure for that. He is not a hero in the sense that Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi is a hero, but in the troubled, manic and confused sense of Abraham, who like it or not, still remains “the father of faith” for the majority of the world’s population.

The film revisits an old and vital question, that every hero of faith encounters: where is the line between passion and pathology, between insanity and self-expression? This is an old question; one that famously plagued Kierkegaard regarding Abraham’s willingness to slay his son Isaac. This willingness to murder his only son, was relieved at the last moment by Yahweh, who provided a ram in Isaac’s stead. But it was Abraham’s willingness to do the deed that made him the father of faith. Does Treadwell’s willingness to sacrifice himself to the bears present a similar holy passion that defies common sense or human logic? Is he perhaps in touch with the divine in a way that the majority of the world now praises Abraham for being?

The Germans have a word, chaoskampf, which describes the hero who tramples down chaos to create beauty and order. (It is important to note that Herzog is a native German speaker.) In this sense of the word, how can we see Treadwell as anything but a hero? He is drawn to the wilderness, leaving behind a life of depression and substance abuse and relentless praises the beauty of the animals he devotes his life to. Where Treadwell sees beauty, order, and love in nature, Herzog claims to only see chaos, murder, and predation. Perhaps the contrasting views are intentional to draw out the internal heroism that Treadwell projected onto the wilderness. Where most of us see only death and destruction, by virtue of Treadwell’s chaoskampf–his heroic vision that guided his life–can find order and beauty. He left civilization a man in despair and found hope where most would find none.

Insane? Perhaps. But is Treadwell’s voluntary sacrafice of himself to the beasts that gave his life meaning any more insane than Abraham’s willingness, determination, to slay his son to demonstrate his faith because of the request of his invisible god? Treadwell’s life and death point to the troubling nature of faith–something to be regarded with fear and trembling–which our world has turned into its opposite. We prefer to think of faith as a safe outcome will all involved will remain protected and safe.

Perhaps Treadwell evokes our responses of disgust and distrust precisely because he lived and died for a faith that those who sneered at him could not endure, even though many of us claim to “have faith” as though it were a pleasant talisman we picked up along the way. His life threatens the effrontery of us who claim to have faith, but refuse to risk anything for it. His freedom to completely disregard the laws of men represents a terrifying possibility which is easier to call insane.

The documentary is peppered with positive or negative evaluations of his behavior, and you may be tempted to fall into this trap as a viewer.  I think we have everything to lose by this approach, because it deflects any responsibility from us as a viewer. Giving Treadwell’s life and social view the customary thumbs-up or thumbs-down response, the cheapening yes-or-no, which we are conditioned to give–that is safer, and by doing so we make ourselves smaller. I believe we can encounter him as something larger. If we step back, we can see that he chose his name and his mission, and he walked on his own two feet toward the death that we all know is coming. Treadwell had faith and the courage not to struggle inside the delusion that life is permanent and safe. And that faith in life brings a freedom that the world has always found terrifying.

This piece is also excerpted at: BEST GEEK BLOG EVER!

People still insist on saying words like community

even though the last community died

when Nashville shut out its lights in 1975.

Goddamn, it’s strange to be alive

like a freight train who’s hurling words into the personless dark-

too strong to expect something back,

too weak to want anything back.

Goddamn, it’s hard to be good looking and young

and to expect so little from everyone else.

Well, that I suppose is the sign that the town

has gotten too small for your thoughts.

Oh, fuck those thoughts already.

Thoughts and thinking aren’t really gonna get ya,

I mean, get ya.

Singer & Songwriter Terry Radigan

Here’s the first episode of A MISSING AMERICA’s weekly podcast! Host Matt Shedd talks with singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Terry Radigan about  her new record, hanging out with Billy Joe Shaver in Nashville, coming up in the world famous Bitter End nightclub in Greenwich village, her creative process,  the importance of smoking cigarettes while writing, and much more. You can even keep browsing Facebook while you stream it, or download it for that afternoon workout. Just check it out…you’ll be glad you did!

Join us next Monday (3/19) when Matt talks with Arthur Alligood about his new album, working with a drummer who’s backed legends like Bob Dylan, George Harrison, and Tom Petty, and growing up in the strange, Biblical, and mysterious American South. Thanks for tuning in!