Dreamroads

There is the driving we do in the daytime, the driving we do in the nighttime, and the driving we do in dreamtime. Who does not have recurring dreams of driving too fast on a curve or in a car without brakes or some other perilous condition? A late poem from Adrienne Rich offers a passenger's experience of dream-driving.

Ansel Adams (Road, Nevada Desert, 1960)

Incline

Dreamroad rising steeply uphill; David is driving. I see it turn-

ing into a perpendicular structure salvaged from a long metal

billboard: we will have to traverse this at a ninety-degree angle,

then at the top go over and down the other side. There are no

exits. Around is the Mojave Desert: open space. D.’s car begins

to lose momentum as the incline increases; he tries shifting into

a lower gear and gunning the engine. There is no way off this

incline now, we’re forced into a situation we hadn’t reckoned

on—a road now becomes something that is no road, something

designated as “commercial space.” I suggest rolling (ourselves

in) the car down the steep dusty shoulder into the desert below,

and out. For both of us, the desert isn’t vacancy or fear, it’s life,

a million forms of witness. The fake road, its cruel deception, is

what we have to abandon.

(From The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004)

Sail on My Brother (Two Trips with Paul Blackburn)

(Photo courtesy AAroads.com)

Visiting friends in Ithaca many years ago, I got off Route 17 (the Southern Tier Expressway) a few exits early, headed north on 81, and followed Blackburn's directions for a visiting friend from "October Journal 1979." (He actually offers two sets of directions; I used the first, more detailed ones). Of which, here is a taste:

The first exit that will jolt you says McGRAW-CORTLAND
         Don't let it tempt you; take the second one, it says
               just CORTLAND. end of the ramp   STOP sign
turn left, under the highway to the first light   (2-3
              gas stations & a Holiday Inn) : turn right
              down Clinton into town.
Two more lights will stop you at Main St. (where Clinton ends his upriver
run--but sail on, captain, my brother)...

The directions worked! (Despite changes in the exit designations). The house was still "white-porched." But, of course, in the driveway there was no "VW wain therein, dark green shaming the maples."

I had forgotten the second trip, until I pulled down my copy of The Journals for this project. Inside, a bus schedule from Aix to Marseilles (Hey, Cortázar!). August of 92, 93? Sharing a small, very hot apartment with Polish friends on the not so fashionable outskirts of Aix. All the locals decamped for Normandy and cooler weather. For us, it was bus trips to the beach at Calais, or bus then Metro to the beach in Marseilles. At night, the whine of motorcycles climbing the A8 (La Provençale). Bagettes from the BP station. Very cheap (and very good) red wine from the bottom shelf (or floor) of the supermarket. Sometimes we'd drink it with ice and lemon.

"Is any coherence worth the celebration?' Blackburn asked in a  early poem. And answered, "Okay." Okay.

Don't Relax Yr Eye (or Yr Foot)

Cortland, NY (courtesy DistancesCalculator.com)

One of the books Cortázar brought for his expedition from Paris to Marseilles was Paul Blackburn's The Journals. Cortázar recalls how, many years before, Blackburn had arrived at his shack in Saignon, in the Vaucluse valleys, to work together on translations of Cortázar's stories. In fact, Cortázar attributes the inspiration to buy himself a dragon, Fafner of Autonauts fame, to the VW camper Blackburn was traveling with, along his wife and sister and an "enormous sombrero."

In The Journals, the poems from the last two or three years of Blackburn's life (he died of cancer in 1971), Blackburn brought everything he saw, did, read, and thought about into these poems. The first poems in the book (like the one below) recount Blackburn's travels in Europe, the later ones his life in Cortland, NY, where he was teaching until his death.

What follow is a partial catalog of the car parts of life from The Journals:

-Shoveling the driveway (twice; this is Cortland after all)

-New York State inspection for the "Gaucelem Faidit Uzerchmobile" (PB's VW camper)

-Giving directions (three poems)

-Traffic jam

-Fast-food joints off the freeway ("intersecting freeways insanely/landscaped by chickens in/constantly revolving baskets")

-Rest stops (twice)

-Tow truck

-"Getting up to move the car"

-Driving after his wife's father's funeral ("I drove very fast")

In "Vaucluse," Blackburn describes his arrival to Cortázar's place. It's the most detailed poetic description of shifting I know of. I'm not doing justice to Blackburn's punctuation and use of space on the page, but here it is:

A track ? Well yes,
& better than that .
the dignity of a dirt road
leading uphill and
full of rocks .

                            Three turns
you can make it in second
if you start fast enuf from the
pavée at the bottom . The fourth
you jus gottta shift down to first, one
smooth fast movement inside the bumps,
inandout / the clutch, very fast & smooth .

The machine claws its way up the final slope
Don't relax yr eye or yr foot's
pressure on the gas pedal
maintain speed   as the signs used to say in the tunnels

     right up that slope where there's a break in the
     stonewall to your left  .  the eye & foot  .  now swing
     fast and left    into the small field
                                                  made it?

     relax yr foot, shift back,  f you feel like it,
     to second  .  move into second, swing to park
     below most of the roofs of the town, the cliffs
     the church  .  It ain't where the buffalo roam, but
     back in neutral without a stall, you're
     at Cortázar's place, Saignon .

Un (Solo) Hombre

I have seen the hunchbacked older man on Roosevelt Avenue many times. Usually wearing a suit and tie and hat I (ignorantly) associate with Lima or Quito, c. 1960. He's usually carrying a plastic shopping bag. Last week, I saw him posting these signs, probably as a way to make a few dollars. He reached up, which is to say straight out, and taped them to the wall. They came up to my hip (but I'm tall for the neighborhood). When I came back a few hours later, with an eye to photographing them, they had all but ripped down. Except the one I found on the window of La Estrella Restaurant.

Bottleneck Blues

A few weeks before the expedition chronicled in Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, Julio Cortazar wrote to the director of the Public Highways Authority in Paris requesting authorization for a "slightly madcap and quite surreal 'expedition,' which would consist of traveling from Paris to Marseille on the autoroute aboard our Volkswagen Combi Van equipped with everything necessary, stopping at each of the sixty-five rest areas at the rate of two per day; in other words, taking more than a month to complete the Paris-Marseille journey without ever leaving the freeway." He wrote because, as he understood, "a vehicle is not allowed to stay on the autoroute for more than two days at a time."

Graphic novelization by Pietro Hadzich

It's not surprising that he never received a reply. What is surprising is that Cortazar was writing to the representative of an organization that had previously requested authorization to publish passages from his story, "The Southern Autoroute," in one of their magazines, which he graciously granted. This raises  two important questions (at least):

(1) What motivated the Authority to use excerpts from Cortazar's story, which imagines a horrendous traffic jam (bouchon) on the highway from Marseilles to Paris, and the impromptu community that emerges over the several days and nights the travelers are trapped there. It's August, and all of Paris is returning from holidays. There is solidarity, charity, suicide, rumors, and romance. And when it's all over (spoiler alert!), and traffic starts to move again, the engineer-protagonist in his Peugeot 404, wonders: "Why all this hurry, why this mad race in the night among unknown cars, where no one knew anything about the others, where everyone looked straight ahead, only ahead."

(2) What were these magazines published by the French Public Highways Authority? And how can I get hold of them?

Los Autonautas

JC and Fafner

A VW camper was much more Cortazar's style. Long after the Seat spot featured in yesterday's post is just a flash in the digital memory pan, readers will be discovering Cortazar's "timeless voyage from Paris to Marseille." As chronicled in Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, in May, 1982, Cortazar and his companion, Carol Dunlop, set out from Paris with the plan to spend the next 31 days on the Autoroute du Soleil--a trip that would normally take 5 or 6 hours. Their rules were simple: they would visit two rest stops per day, sleeping overnight at the second. They would live on what they packed into their VW camper-van dragon, Fafner, and provisions from friends who met them at several points along the way, and what they could obtain at the occasional rest-stop shop or restaurant. As it was, above all, a scientific expedition, they kept notes on what they saw, ate, drank, and thought about.

They were on the highway itself just minutes a day, since the rest stops were spaced every 20 kms or so (the French love their Aires). Some are quite lush, others mere concrete parking areas parallel to the highway. Either way, they would decamp and set up the "florid horrors" (chaise lounges), table, books, typewriters, bottles, and get to work.  Cortazar describes the reaction to the idea among friends as acquaintances as falling into "two 'antagonistic camps, "those who simply thought them mad and those who preferred to include them in the category of idiots."

A very fine madness. (Also, technically illegal, as French law allows travelers no more than two consecutive days on the autoroute. They had to hide their toll tickets and pay the maximum.)

Auto-Ironia

We're pretty familiar with the use of pop songs as soundtracks for car commercials (from "Like a Rock" to Nick Drake), and much else besides. But poetry? Here is a Spanish ad for the Seat Leon that uses excerpts from Julio Cortazar's "Preamble to the Instructions on How to Wind a Watch" (from Cronopios and Famas).

Does the pleasure of hearing Cortazar read overcome the distaste of having his poetry turned into advertising copy? And what have they done with his text? Here is the complete text (as translated by Paul Blackburn). I highlighted the excerpts used in the ad:

Think of this: When they present you with a watch they are gifting you with a tiny flowering hell, a wreath of roses, a dungeon of air. They aren't simply wishing a watch on you, and many more, and we hope it will last you, it's a good brand, Swiss, seventeen rubies; they aren't just giving you this minute stonecutter which will bind you by the wrist and walk along with you. They are giving you--they don't know it--they are gifting you with a fragile and precarious piece of yourself, something that's not a part of your body, that you have to strap to your body like your belt, like a tiny furious bit of something hanging onto your wrist. They give you the job of having to wind it every day, an obligation to wind it, so that it goes on being a watch; they gift you with the obsession of looking into jewelry-shop windows to check the exact time, check the radio announcer, check the telephone service. They gift you the fear, someone will steal it from you, it'll fall on the street and get broken. They give you the gift of your trademark and the assurance that it's a trademark better than others, they gift you with the impulse to compare your watch with other watches. They aren't giving you a watch, you are the gift, they're giving you yourself for the watch's birthday.

Maybe the real pleasure(?) is in contemplating just how poorly they have misunderstood the poem and the relationship of people to things it investigates. Or maybe it's just ironic? Come to think of it, the Seat Ironia is not a bad name for a car.