Clickety-Clack

Feb 4 2015

Riding the train
taking the long way home
is like listening to jazz
with your eyes closed.
Black vinyl
held by the edges
with fingers extended, hands opposed.
The turntable
hypnotically circling,
needle inserted
in its pre-determined track.

The train’s rocking
is like white noise
converted to motion.
As imperfect, reassuring
as a recording you’ve loved,
lightly scratched
a little warped.
Your head lolls, shoulders shudder
body gently jolts,
the clickety-clack
is a soothing mantra
repeating itself.

Like an analog recording
you follow the grooves
from start to finish
in real time.
Surrender yourself
in this enclosed space
at a steady pace
in the glorious haze
of the saxophone solo,
the grounding thump of the bass.

Or you could enter a plane, ducking under the doorway,
and next thing you know
find yourself home.
As if you'd blinked
and outside the window
the scenery got changed.
A digital device, that gets you there,
all-or-nothing

yes-or-no.

But on the train, you gratefully slump
in the seat of your choosing,
let yourself sink
into aimless daydreams, innocent slumber.
Like a bag of sandy soil,
dug
last summer
from the garden you still can smell,
you take the shape of your container
release your weight.
The train’s

gentle agitation

shaking you up
so your contents settle-out,
awkward lumps, down to the bottom
fine particles
migrating up.

Your placid surface

smooth as jazz.
A tropical beach
before bare feet
have wandered across it,
sun-warmed sand
squeezing-in
between your toes.

I just read this piece in The Atlantic On-Line. It's an excerpt from an 1862 edition of the magazine, written by Oliver Wendell Jones Sr., the father of the (then) future Supreme Court justice. Here it is -- after which I'll explain what it has to do with this poem:

Many times, when I have got upon the cars, expecting to be magnetized into an hour or two of blissful reverie, my thoughts shaken up by the vibrations into all sorts of new and pleasing patterns, arranging themselves in curves and nodal points, like the grains of sand in Chladni's famous experiment,—fresh ideas coming up to the surface, as the kernels do when a measure of corn is jolted in a farmer's wagon,—all this without volition, the mechanical impulse alone keeping the thoughts in motion, as the mere act of carrying certain watches in the pocket keeps them wound up,—many times, I say, just as my brain was beginning to creep and hum with this delicious locomotive intoxication, some dear detestable friend, cordial, intelligent, social, radiant, has come up and sat down by me and opened a conversation which has broken my day-dream, unharnessed the flying horses that were whirling along my fancies and hitched on the old weary omnibus-team of every-day associations, fatigued my hearing and attention, exhausted my voice, and milked the breasts of my thought dry during the hour when they should have been filling themselves full of fresh juices.

You don't read sentences like this anymore. Our culture is too fast-paced and impatient. We aren't inclined to stick out a self-indulgent metaphor, and aren't supple enough to surrender ourselves to a pile-up of unrelated ones. (Not mixed metaphors, which were always inelegant; just a lovely indirect trip, like the free association of daydreams.) The metaphor I admire most (or, to be accurate, analogy) is the kernels of corn: I can feel the weight of the bag, the strained seams of its container, the small act of settling with every little jolt.

Immediately on reading this piece, I felt impelled to write another train poem (on top of the few I've already written, even though trains are not nearly as big a recurring trope with me as, for example, trees.) Not a super-fast high-tech bullet train on its perfectly levelled track in Europe or Japan, but an old-fashioned train on steel rails -- the kind that still travels coast-to-coast in this unhurried and somewhat complacent country of ours.

I can hardly claim originality, since his bag of corn becomes my bag of sandy soil. But the other analogy -- a jazz record -- does better. Jazz came to me as I thought about the perfect accompaniment to a long journey by train. And then, it seemed wrong to be on anything but vinyl. I think the analog/digital comparison works really well: going from start to finish, conducting the journey in real time. I used to make audio tapes of favourite radio shows -- a very fussy business. I'd use a timer, and an hour long show would take an hour to transfer to cassette. Now, listening to podcasts, the show jumps almost instantaneously from my computer to my iPod; I can "tape" whenever I want; and listening back, I can skip the boring parts as if obliterating time. Getting on a plane is utilitarian, and digital. Travelling by diesel train is slow, and analog: you see everything you pass; and you see it at eye level, in real time. I also like the care you take with a vinyl record (held by the edges/ with fingers extended, hands opposed): a singular object you can touch and cherish, as opposed to digital blips reproducing themselves somewhere in cyber-space.

Like the subject of this desultory sentence -- train travel itself -- we don't have time. This is a great theme for me, since I admire the flaneur, the boulevardier, idling away his time observing the crowd, nursing a coffee in the outdoor café. And I'm all about creating free unstructured time: which I need; both as an introvert, who needs to decompress and recharge, and as a creative person, who needs open-endedness. Our culture approves of people brag-lamenting how busy they are. While I'm happy to admit I'm not at all busy; and what's more, don't feel the least bit guilty about it!