Bull Treatise

So it becomes apparent that there is a fixation not just with place -- the proud anonymity of southeastern Wisconsin -- but also time. There is a fierce and impenetrable temporal fascination: the pre-Internet era, yes, but specifically this strange portion of it: maybe 1968 to 1995. (The Internet around, certainly, but not a world-force player.) And then...here is the spatiality again, but to a different bent: Imagine backpacking into the Wind River Range in west-central Wyoming (a wild and ferocious country, then and now) in 1982, when the most relevant topographic map still dated from the 19th century, and when you probably ate at some lonesome crossroads Mexican joint, made one last intercept through a gleaming black (or maybe blue) payphone; and Orson Welles was still just alive, also Edward Abbey and Townes Van Zandt, when Family Ties and The Cosby Show were flickering domestically well off the highway as you headed toward the great blackness...you get the picture.

(The picture attached here is of Tygh Valley on the east front of the Oregon Cascades in 2008...the beautiful morph from Cascades deep-forest [black and blue wood] to Columbia Plateau scrub steppe. Such a landscape might seem to scream, "1850"...but just as throatily it bellows, "1985.")

Music, too, figures into it...but more in the distorted, blurred tableau (Tom Waits referred to it as the smudging of wallpaper, perceived from a distance) you would pick up at the gas station, blaring from the sound system of a worked-upon car at a Rawlins roadside. And still the outlaw Grizzlies in the high country, with everything bronzed through the Corps of Discovery reaching some kind of elegiac zenith: "This is just before everything ends."

Now, things are beginning again -- and that is surely good -- but the level of scrutiny is, perhaps, too searing, too intense. Before, the catalog was in the brain, the heart, upon teletype paper. And isn't it strange to imagine the 2009 bears roaming down into the Wind Rivers from the Teton country, re-occupying land so recently vacated by progenitors violently removed and of an entirely different era? Sort of like a jazz-obsessive of the 21st century acquiring the meat of a 20th-century obsessive's collection through eBay or some shit, pouring over it maybe two or three decades after its original keeper did, only now with digital camera and euphoric Tweets and Facebook sound-files and anachronistic hipster-exuberance. When did Calvin and Hobbes become martyrs? Was it about the same time that we began applying to college, when we noticed that all our Austrian counterparts -- in addition to being doused in cologne and obsessed with The Phantom Menace -- had insatiable attachment to these witch-doctor placebo-effect terrors called "cell phones"?

Crucially, Son House died in 1988. This conception of "time," certainly of "generations" -- we assembled here are technically Generation Y, which lumps us ludicrously with the Hannah Montana crowd, though I personally remember Ronald Reagan speaking in Port Washington, Wisc., remember also Saturday Night Live hedonism under bedsheet fort-canopies (I saw Dead Poet's Society, Indian Jones & The Last Crusade, The Bear, The Brave Little Toaster -- all in the theater) -- well, I suppose this segmenting fails us, it is woeful and savage.