I started The Perfect Song in 1979 in a dark, damp little basement
room in a small two-story house.
My daughter was four. My son wasn’t born yet.
It all began with a man searching for his art, his own song that
would share its perpetual melody with the world. There’s
some Mendel in all of us. Look at all the artists who spent their
lives searching for perfection in their art –
Hemingway, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and thousands of
others. There’s no right way to do it, only the individual way.
There’s no time frame. Picasso lived to be 91 and continued
his search, his art growing simpler and more subtle with each passing decade
until he reached Zen simplicity. Rimbaud wrote it all before he was 20,
through his art aside and became a gunrunner in Africa.
There are no barriers for those who believe. Beethoven created
some of the greatest music of all time after he was deaf. Renoir
created a body of the world’s most beautiful paintings though he was crippled with
arthritis in his later years and had to paint with the brush tied to his
wrists. Helen Keller led a life of inspiration and joy, though she was
blind and deaf.
Reality is in the mind. The mind creates and the body finds a way
to express the creation in this dimension.
Poul
spent his nights shivering in the sprawling cornfield that
Mendel was now forming into poetry.
We create our own joy and suffering.
Mendel grew to understand this. Poul, toward the end, in a muddled,
frenzied kind of way, understood this. Beasely instinctively
knew this. After all, didn’t he create Mendel?
Beasely never met Mendel but he understood the creative urge, and he understood
the everyday person’s need for art. He understood our need for music,
fiction, myth.
I took an idea that was given to me. I found my inspiration in the great artists
throughout history and in myths. We wouldn’t have The Odyssey and The
Iliad if Homer hadn’t preserved them. They were great stories of passion,
greed, love and gods. They’ve lasted thousands of years. The story
of Achilles and the fall of Troy were the subject of a TV miniseries and
a movie in 2004.
Cervantes. Shakespeare. Twain. Writers who understood the conflicting passions
of the human soul. They told good stories and the stories become myths.
Are my aspirations grandiose? Damn right they are. I want to reach farther
than my grasp. Mendel reaches far beyond what’s humanly possible to
clutch. But in doing so he brings back more than anyone before him.
Poul starts out as a simple, directionless fool who wants easy money. He learns
there is no easy money. In fact, he works harder than any human should to
continue making money that he never enjoys. His enlightenment comes when
he finally realizes that his purpose is far, far bigger than money.
Beasely is driven by the ghost of his father and the instincts of a fox. He
gets everything he wants except the one human thing he needs.
Both Mendel and Beasely are geniuses in their own way. But it’s Poul,
the bumbler, the complainer, the nature-hater, who is the pathway between the
two men. It’s Poul who is the enabler, the synapse between two geniuses.
Without Poul as a live connection between the two, the songs would never have
been given to the world.
Maybe on some other level I always understood this. But only now as I write
this do I appreciate it. Art is a strange gift. We create it, then we spend
our lives working to understand it.
Or, maybe like Mendel, we throw it away and move on to create something better.
This is good, but not good enough. There’s something better in me. I
feel it. I need to explore it, then create it. I will push on. I will create.
If it’s not good enough I’ll keep pushing on. I’ll create,
cast away, create.
Always, through the joy and despair, there is discovery and creation.
In.
. .out. . .in. . .out. . . .With a guttural roar it spat
itself forth again, offering, taking away, in a smooth,
unending cycle of lovemaking between water and earth.
The place where we lived was in the woods and at night the wind would sing
in the darkness through the trees.
The Appalachians are full of songs, songs of beauty, mystery, sweetness and
violence.
But while the songs of the Appalachians are universal, songs from other parts
of the land, of different cultures, have their own unique coloration and Mendel
knew – and I knew – that he had to move on.
So I followed him. My wife and I began driving. She was seeking her perfect
song and I was seeking mine. Mendel was insistent in his freedom. He had
no direction, no agenda. He simply followed his instincts and wrote about
what he experienced.
And I followed him. More on those travels later.
* * * *
But as I look back, the inception
took place long ago, when I was a child, growing up on a farm
on a mountain that overlooks all the other Appalachian foothills.
On summer nights, my dad and my brothers and I slept outside
and the night breeze caressed us, and down below, past the barnyard,
the pond with the croaking frogs, past the hayfield, and the
stone walls where three-foot milk snakes resided, was the dark
and mysterious swamp. An owl lived down there and his haunting “whooo” echoed
through the night, trailing off quietly into the valley below
us. The night was vast, unending.
It was the swamp where my black and white pony, Stormy, ventured, and never
came out. We found his body years later, or what was left of it – bones
covered by huge shreds of his black and white fur. He had been sick and weak
and gotten stuck in the bog, and slowly starved to death. The swamp covered
him from us until it was ready to reveal his body to us.
This wasn’t the first time the swamp played tricks on us.
One night while lying out on the grass covered by a blanket and staring up
at the huge expanse of stars, a scream rose from the swamp, filling the night,
and scaring my brothers and me nearly to death. It was the first time I ever
remember my hair at the back of my head standing up. It was the shrill scream
of a woman being brutally murdered. We all lay there in petrified silence
until Dad said quietly, “A bobcat.”
“They sound like that?”
I could feel him nod in the darkness. “Yeah.”
It was the most frightening sound I ever heard until years later when I was
a reporter on a murder scene and I heard the scream of the mother as she watched
her dead son being carried away.
The swamp was a good place in the daytime. But as daylight faded and dusk faded
into darkness, the swamp turned evil. I write about it in another story.
