NOTHING ON BUT HER HONEY

27. SHE HAD NOTHING ON BUT HER HONEY:

They came from some little town called Success and it was a place I could never find again as much as I might try – but of course that was 1937 and in some ways YES that was a long time ago but the place had silver-handled shovels for a guide and trees which only twisted left ever since the farmer named Cotley had bull-dozed some ditch to make a carp-pond - which carp he sold for a profit to some industry-based conglomerate concentrating on fish – but now a lot of that place has just dried out and died and the old wooden sheds are crumbled and gone and only what remains are perhaps three or four of the old houses which used to dot the woods here and there very deep and alone into the woods each was and you see BACK THEN people lived alone and no one had a care or an opinion of their companions or if they did and it wasn’t good they just kept quiet about it or removed it from reference and you see there was more to worry about than stuff like that : whether or not the water was running if the stream stood if the spring hadn’t gone dry if the roof would hold the winter if you had something left to eat for the month - birds deer fish (of course) and every little ground animal there ever was abounded and each eventually too became some sort of food or meat anyway if you couldn’t eat what you were growing any longer and there were really but two SEASONS – the Winter which was nearly always present and seemed to linger with devious intent and the Summer which was really just a deep deep cove of vicious still heat and fetid air which hung around the bogs and waters for bugs and flies to MOST SURELY appreciate and I’d myself walk the old paths which ran in every direction - I’d walk more in glory than toil - even with the bugs around my face and be astounded by the Godly silence and great deep majesty of the forest and the trees - the secretive noises of chipmunks and fur the wind whispering its name through thick trees and it was of a stillness that I could touch and understand and it was something which made you feel singular and exalted on God’s solid land and left alone to one’s own devices nothing else was needed but oneself and the path to Salvation for LORD lord God was everywhere it seemed and every tree too had a message and so many times I’d be able to read messages where I’d never seen them before - on the escarpments and the wounds of tree bark on the twisted broken pieces of limbs left growing on strange stumps EVERYTHING it seemed had something to say some message to impart and that was THAT WAS when I first learned of ‘SIGNIFICATION’ - which of course I later built my entire career around and made my fortune - ‘Signification’ being something no one had ever known of before and it fell to me (after great thought after bouts of lone silence after months and weeks of solid woodsy meditation) to bring this theory forth - and the rest I guess is ‘History’ or you wouldn’t be reading this - and oh by the way that thing about her having nothing on but her honey – that referred to a time back when I was younger and there was a cabin deep in these woods (out now somewhere I can’t find any more – near the double-bent oak and the stream face twisting where once a rock outcropping stood) – anyway her name was ‘Manna’ – named by her mama for some bible-thumping reason back in the chapel we once kept for message-trading and Sunday service (mostly Bible reading or ‘learning’ to read) and they kept bees there too and once the real Summer came I’d find Manna tending bees and doing chores – just like that naked as a Mayfly – and since it was always pleasant to see and she was always tending to bees – I’d say ‘there she is ! with nothing on but her honey!’
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It was fun living like that - compared to what’s around today : for there are certain myths we live by – things like independence discernment social niceties and that peculiar small-town ethos of ‘place’ of which this nation is so proud - which of course does not simply does not exist any more – not in any way shape or form – and yet the less it is actually prevalent the MORE people seem to pull it out of a hat when necessary (for politics for votes for sentiment and local color) and I suppose in its own way it adds some texture or flavor at least to the little illusionary life they think about as they run for a big-city train or get into their cars each morning to once more ferret their way through a slowly mystifying and stalled mass of traffic and commute AFTER ALL these are ‘Americans’ the ones who live free and unfettered lives amidst abundance liberty riches and a form of ‘personal’ independence mostly it seems dependant on the cable or movie bill they amass (but I digress) in this small-town IDEAL America people are still free to form their own opinions and understandings of things unconnected to the buzzing media streams and nearly-propagandistic enforcements of various norms which – in actuality – strait-jacket them and their works but this imagined streak of liberty and freedom too masks from itself – even in its density – so many falsehoods and variations from the real Liberty which should act as archetype that people gloss over the ‘other’ factors involved which demean and de-solidify this fantasy – things like how many of them actually work off a tax-based payroll in municipal or governmental jobs or its adjuncts how many live off the medical industry and its hype and waste and manufactured false needs how many are ear-deep in debt and mired in another sort of unrecognized poverty and of course how many can not will not make a move without first testing out its acceptance or making sure they won’t look stupid YEAH WELL there’s no ‘Liberty’ in any of that is there ? and just this morning in the small wellspring of fantasy town that I live in I watched as in the early morning of a languid Sunday the Main Street was set up for what was being billed as a ‘Town Fair’ or one of those closed-street expos which turn the roadways into walkways and have them lined with booths banners tents music and food – I watched as slowly the street was transformed : the eager-to-please storefront businesses of course salivated as they arrived upon a day of freely enticed crowds and expanded business volume based upon the accident of location and chamber-of-commerce enforced blather – crowds would come coin would turn sales would most definitely occur – all by the magic of ‘calling’ the name of God (in this case the God of business) and drawing upon the fantasy myth of – once again – ‘small-town’ activity but the myth of course belied itself as I watched not local effects being set-up so much as networks of much wider movements – state-wide causes themed appeals and the usual crafts and hobby bunglers who show up at these things regardless of location week after week somewhere like sales scavengers of ashtray pottery butterfly and tee shirt affluence NOTHING very local there and the only local things I did see were the normal school teams and school causes church groups and political factions and car-club stalwarts seen anywhere else (oh I forgot – I did see one bloviating lead-councilman talking animatedly with a clump of four local policeman and an EMT – talk about ‘local’ insider info!) but nonetheless my point is that the localness of this entire minor industry is really the localness of who you can get to come to your ‘local’ fete - like the bombastic band which I watched setting up with amplifiers name-banners and a van marked with their signature logo and motto - something about ‘street-party entertainers’ – (another Sunday another town) all of this meanwhile as small streams of people began accumulating in their little pools filled with the expectation of pleasure and entertainment and – once more – the mythology of partaking locally in their own Tom Sawyer Huck Finn Becky Thatcher fest of enlivening local adventure (meanwhile the adjacent main roadways were filled with slowed and disgruntled drivers on their ways to wherever else along Rt. 27 or detoured along side-streets sloppy with both pedestrians and gawkers) SO I guess what I am saying is that the mythos of what we live is often overshadowed by how hard the effort is which we put into maintaining the artificiality of that false ethos - we support and propagate to each other in our own ways the illusion of what we are doing while at some other level knowing and understanding full well its artificiality and flimsiness but yet maybe THAT too is the strength of it all - they cut the trees they pave the land they build endless homes they crowd the streets but it is ALL done in the name of closeness local warmth color and communality - something mercurial which the more we try to grab at it disperses itself more and more and thereby eludes both our grasp and its own existence WE LIVE thereby in a dream-world of our making and more power to that I guess ! and one thing's for certain - people who work on the government dole off taxpayer money should be the LAST to crow about independence liberty freedom individualism and all that and those church bells which were tolling (off somewhere in the background) were chiming - I believe - for some other God than the God of Mammon which as I said before was evidently having QUITE the field day on this pleasant Sunday morning and as Salustius said - way back in the 4th century - 'Myths are things which never happened but always are.'