Between Two Worlds and Neither Here Nor There

Of the dozen or so friends who said they would be following these posts, I have only had any reply from two, whether by email, telephone, or here. So I don't know if anyone is tuning in, or not. In any case, this may be my final "broadcast".

The above illustration is from Alfred P. Morgan's 1913 book, The Boy Electrician. It is also the logo I had printed and affixed to the sides of my van before setting out on this journey. Around the picture, in large print, are the words, "HARZ RADIO THEATER". All these elements: Morgan's book and its contents, the illustration and reference to a radio theater represent a story, actually a collection of tales and images drawn from folklore, mythology, philosophy, and even the vaudevillian stage. In addition to these, and "cheap at half the price" were specimens, both real and imaginary, including the remains of a fossilized Trilobite and a fish that swam in prehistoric seas some 350,000,000 million years ago. An antique bottle containing what was labeled as Lactidorus Scutigerus, Third Larval Stage, said to have been removed from the Eustachian tube of a Dromedary camel circa 1888, was also "available for viewing". And there were other allegorical, metaphorical, and  generally enigmatic things to be seen and heard for the asking.

But no one asked. No, actually, two people of the hundreds who passed by and looked at the words and image posted on the side of the van did stop and ask. One of them was the other old codger, like myself, Carl, whom I wrote about in a recent post. The other was in a hurry to go somewhere else, and so never "opened the cover of the book" so to speak. And, since my way has never been to bang on a drum, shout through a megaphone, or advertise with that almost guaranteed to be effective slogan, "As seen on TV!" nothing very much came of the ideas I set forth with along America's back roads and byways.

Like Christopher Morley's Parnassus on Wheels, the Harz Radio Theater is an anachronism. It is, I fear, in the same class with the many boarded up movie theaters and opera houses I passed by, and may even have something in common with the trilobite and fossilized fish in my Wunderkammer. Perhaps if I had had a partner who thought it might be more effective and even necessary to bang on a drum (and was willing to do so), or had this been an enterprise of friends, a troupe, say, then I would not have had to carry and replenish the enthusiasm for whatever we might do - right time, right place, right people. Well and so, like the young fellow in the illustration (now turned 75 and becoming somewhat more curmudgeonly - admittedly so) I am still listening in to those faint, hardly perceptible signals that belong mostly to another world and time. I find them worth listening to, and I still believe they are worth passing along in this present age, for the simple reason that they would be worth thinking about and beneficial to the larger human community in more ways than anything "seen on TV" or available at even the Mall of America. 

But even Idries Shah once commented that "it's hard to tell people things that they don't think they need to hear". And I am no Sufi; not even a contender.

When I first set out on this adventure, one of the primary motivating factors (apart from my promise to Kukla - to take her to the seaside) was that I was spending far too much time in my Bouton Street hermitage, with my main social life being an occasional trip to the hardware store or grocery aisles, and the main conversation of those places usually limited to, "How much is that?" "Paper or plastic?" "Credit or debit?" "Did you find everything you were looking for?" And before I began wobbling on the perch, I thought I might yet find "birds of a feather" and other versions of Paths of Affinity on such a journey as I prepared and have described here. At this point, today, in Delta, Colorado, I have not yet "found everything that I was looking for". I have traveled over 4,000 miles and still have at least 2,000 more to go. And at this point I am beginning to question whether I really want to drive all the way back to Bouton Street and the social life of Hyde Park Plaza. 

I have seen a lot on this journey, and thought a lot about the world and time we live in. And I must agree with the astute observation of the psychoanalyst who managed to escape the worst of Hitler's Germany shortly before the End - because I believe it applies to our own present as well:

"Here, life goes on in a most peculiar way - sometimes as though there were nothing the matter."