“I whistled louder, remembering anonymous trees and flowers.”
— Travis Champ, “Landmarks and Legacies”
Tendrils of funk curled out when I opened the door of our truck at the Mohler Co-op. Blues had coiled round me, as often happens when I consume too much news, or confuse social media with the common good.
Many folks hope to make a difference in the world, some of us through words. I’m ridden by dreams of helping write America’s revolution at this far-west edge of empire. The demons are coming. The demons are coming. In fact their insatiable hunger has long possessed our hemisphere, prodded us to grab every ounce of flesh, trade fellowship for cannibal greed.
Life outside the urban curtains can feel withdrawn, yet it offers room to muse, look inward and commune with transformative stories. Plus therapy. Farm tasks help me leave the wordy screen, do practical stuff like pick up bales. We needed straw for our newly-mucked barn, clean gold to cover the lime that Jennifer and I scattered to neutralize all that ruminant pee.
Chores with tangible outcomes are gratifying. Yet mister constrictor crawled out in the cab as I crossed the river valley, thinking. What does it mean to make art in the boonies, pore long over sentences that never scale the muckety-muck steps of public attention? How does one who loves the civic beauty of words keep forking them onto the floor?
One does, is what I know. And it’s medicine to know other ones who do.
After paying the clerk I pulled up to the Mohler hay-barn. A worker was on break at the nearby picnic table, smoking a cigarette. Didn’t recognize him until I got closer, and the blur of presence came into focus. So swirls a supernormal eddy that sometimes catches me up in little exorcisms, praise be.
I first encountered Travis Champ by way of “Old Nehalem Road” — his debut chapbook of poetry published by Nestucca Spit Press in 2007. That incantation of place moved me deeply. In fact the hand-bound letterpress tome contains some of the most potent local poems I’ve ever read. Later I relished his essay “Landmarks and Legacies” (published by Nestucca Spit Press in 2009 as part of “Citadel of the Spirit: Oregon’s Sesqincentennial Anthlogy,” edited by Matt Love). Since then I’ve admired other work he’s shared, mostly poetry collected in several chapbooks.
“How’s the writing?” I asked Travis as he raised the hay-barn door. He said it was going well, then he told me about a new project involving the erasure of words from edited versions of a story he authored.
Travis isn’t a big talker, but sometimes when he speaks his words seem grounded in an older reality. Gravity feels stronger in such moments, even as spirits rise. Surely artists have anchored in that buoyant vibe since primordial times. And looking out from those moorings, Travis added with satisfaction: “the other day I erased three and a half consecutive pages.”
The manuscript for his edited story totaled one thousand sheets of paper, before this erasure process. Travis intends to dismantle and remake it into a 50-page prose poem, which he hopes to have ready for publication next fall. For readers unfamiliar with his work, several contextual notes are warranted.
First, his aforementioned story was inspired by trips to Paris that he undertook, alone, after scraping together enough workingman’s wages to cover travel costs for weeks of food and lodging. Travis has made similar boot-strap excursions from his hinterland digs to Mexico City, Santiago, and other destinations, each linked to personal writing projects. These solo dives into cosmopolitan life have always struck me as sort of heroic, though they sound like casual errands if he mentions them.
Second, his use of erasure as a creative tool was demonstrated in his chapbook of poetry “Behind the Daytime,” published in 2017 by Abandon Press (a small press Travis built and also uses to feature the work of other poets like Bradley Ray King, David Longoria, and Rose Swartz). These particular poems are composed mostly of formerly legible words that Travis selected with care and then meticulously Xed out, letter by letter. Only choice bits of lingual tissue remain attached to his skeletal lines.
Third, Travis seldom discusses his art, unless asked, at which point he’s usually willing to share his thoughts without fanfare or drama. He seems immersed in a creative process that doesn’t need or want to talk about itself. Which might make him a good candidate for an indie documentary about outsider artists, if the right avant garde filmmaker were to show up in Mohler at the right moment.*
I was surprised to run into Travis, in fact didn’t know he was working at the Co-op. Yet our convergence at that rural hub dispelled my funky mood. Such tonic inspires testimony, not simply as an expression of gratitude, but to emphasize something crucial to art. Earlier I alluded to this thing as “fellowship,” though “brotherly love” works fine.
In addition to poetry and prose, Travis is a singer-songwriter. Jennifer and I have heard him play at a number of area venues. For five years he spearheaded an annual gathering called “Electric Fences,” described in informational material as “an autonomous DIY event, rejecting the necessity of sponsorships and operating under the idea that a smaller, less restrictive model of the traditional music festival would create a more memorable and enduring experience for audiences and performers.”
Travis recently made an album of ten country songs. The LP includes instrumentation from artists he brought to Oregon from Austin and Nashville, maxing out several credit cards he acquired solely for that purpose. I asked Travis where I could purchase the album. “Oh, just stream it for free,” he said, then proceeded to tell me how. I emphasized my desire to buy the actual record. He suggested Jim probably had one at Nehalem Music & Game. Thus my melancholy quest for straw spun into a serendipitous drop-in on our friendly neighborhood doom-metal growler, salal moonshiner, owner of Bandageman Records, and curator of new and used recordings.
Rummaging behind the counter Jim Kosharek found a single copy of Travis’s album, “The Blue Dirt of Paradise,” which he proclaimed “kick-ass” then sold me for a pale semblance of its vested value. Jim is right. I’ve listened to the record many times, and suspect it would be applauded in equal measure by both literary aficionados and regulars at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge. The songs are a stew of smooth old-school country sound with lyrics full of roily bookishness. Buckaroo services thoroughbred Beat, and vice-versa maybe. If the right person(s) in Nashville and/or Austin were to hear these songs, they might be moved to inject some cool hybrid juju into the Music Cities, inspire Jennifer and me to revisit our old stomping grounds.
For that to happen, however, said agent(s) would have to love music enough to overcome part of the album’s artistry that defies convention. Travis challenges the prospect of commercial success with a baffling display of anonymity. His name does not appear anywhere on his record, nor does any date or clear contact information, nor are any of his songs copyrighted (though his lyrics are prominently printed on the sleeve). Also, Travis made a point of featuring his fellow artists while remaining absent from the album’s launch event (he often listens from the sidelines at gigs he organizes).
I’ve yet to ask my friend to explain this habit of personal concealment. Guessing at his reasons is cathartic and fun.
Maybe his self-erasure is a countercultural response to today’s art-world, where industry profits and brand-name marketing matter more than art. Is Travis emphasizing the collective nature of all creativity? Perhaps this is an act of grassroots tomfoolery, a way to jump those fences of red-tape that limit references to other artists. Could be Travis is riding in the hoof-steps of that rascal Ben Franklin, who rather than pursue a private patent for his lightening rod, simply released it to the commons by penning articles about the invention without including his name. One reviewer suggests that by removing his name from the equation (and those of his twenty accomplices) Travis gives listeners more room to explore a musical sense of place. I’m picturing a worker-owned bordello armed with flaming librarians, somewhere in the dust south of El Paso.
In his lyrics Travis does spotlight the names of other artists and their work, with special nods to Latin literati. This is fitting, given the demographics of our home county. Like many farming areas, Tillamook hosts a sizable Spanish-speaking community. By layering in salutes to masters of that language, Travis expands our thinking about the meaning of “country,” takes us further South. Here’s a sample stanza from his song “Yellow Rose of Borges.”
Cross Rio Grande by grace of morning
Words to break and time to pass
Showing 2666 like a pistol placed upon the dash
Find a cheap room with a shower
Lace the mattress with some cash
Step on out into The Darkness
While the daylight has your back
The title of this song references a work of flash fiction by the Argentine titan of letters, Jorge Luis Borges (“A Yellow Rose,” published by Emecé Editores in 1960).** In this song Travis also marks a massive novel by the Chilean/Mexican/Spanish superstar Roberto Bolaño, “2666,” (published by Anagrama in 2004, one year after his death).
Recently I’ve been exploring Bolaño’s work, which I do not recommend to most readers. His “2666” is a thousand-plus-page bohemoth that incudes a long abysmal section detailing an outbreak of violent crimes against women near Mexico’s northern border. After enduring that darkness I read Belaño’s best-known book, “The Savage Detectives” (Anagrama, 1998), in hopes of cleansing my palate and fathoming why so many accolades adorn his writing.
Therein I keyed in on an excerpt that links the two novels and propels my understanding. It’s lifted from a journal entry (January 29) describing a point in the story when a band of ragtag poets comes close to tracking down the long-missing founder of their literary movement. She’s a mysterious elder who they’ve never met, named Cesárea. In the same borderland where all those violent crimes occur they learn their founder worked as a teacher for a while. They interview her former colleague, also a teacher, who tells them about a visit to Cesarea’s tenement room full of notebooks.
“The room where Cesárea lived was clean and neat, as one would expect the room of a former teacher, but something emanated from it that weighed on her heart. The room was painful proof of the nearly impossible distance between her and her friend. It wasn’t that it was untidy or smelled bad (as Bolano wondered), or that Cesárea’s poverty had surpassed the limits of gentility, or that the filth of Calle Ruben Dario extended into every corner, but something subtler, as if reality were skewed inside that lost room, or even worse, as if over time someone (who but Cesárea?) had imperceptibly turned her back on reality. Or, worst of all, had twisted it on purpose.” (Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer.)
No doubt the prospect of changing reality intrigued those poets, drawing them nearer to their founder’s thrall. Yet for Cesárea’s former colleague, even a hint of such alchemy was off-putting. Estrangement often strikes when art inhabits the fringes, where there is no backing by polis poobahs. Some souls adapt to the alienation, forge strength inside their closets. Cesárea explained to her friend that she kept a switchblade because she lived under the threat of death, “and then she laughed, a laugh, the teacher remembers, that echoed past the walls of the room and the stairs until it reached the street, where it died.”
The estrangement grew when Cásarea shared a plan involving the factory where she worked. The only clues about the plan given to readers are references to education and literacy. I take this as an invitation to speculate. Maybe within that room of her own, in the belly of violence, Bolaño’s fictional founder of visceral realism was lettering spells to transform her place of labor into a mixed use development combining safe affordable housing, classrooms, maker space for micro-enterprises, and an awesome library. Such plans are easily dismissed as quixotic, even shunned when un-endorsed by authorities. Consummation requires breakout from a web of social rejection, an exodus that may require lifetimes.
“And then the teacher had to sit down on the edge of the bed, although she didn’t want to, and close her eyes and listen to what Cesárea was saying. And even though she was feeling worse and worse, she had the courage to ask Cesárea why she had drawn the plan. And Cesárea said something about days to come, although the teacher imagined that if Cesárea had spent time on that senseless plan it was simply because she lived such a lonely life. But Cesárea spoke of times to come and the teacher, to change the subject, asked her what times she meant and when they would be. And Cesárea named a date, sometime around the year 2600. Two thousand six hundred and something. And then, when the teacher couldn’t help but laugh at such a random date, a smothered little laugh that could scarcely be heard, Cesárea laughed again, although this time the thunder of her laughter remained within the confines of her own room. From that moment on, the teacher recalled, the tension in the air of Cesárea’s room, or the tension that she imagined in the air, faded until it went away.”
This recollected visit may seem of no significance, like so many encounters. But it strikes me as a lynchpin in Bolaño’s massive narrative. A laugh between friends might make a big difference in what happens over the long haul.
Bit by bit, small social interactions swirl together to construct the world around us. A bookshop visitor reaffirmed this verity just as I completed that last paragraph on my laptop. Unprompted, with no idea what I’d been writing, the customer passed along a quote from one of his students at Hood River High School. “Together we’re a genius,” said my visitor (Bob Williams was his name). Then Bob corrected himself, saying it wasn’t one student, really, but the whole class, because they all talked about the idea and agreed it was true. After which Bob passed along a companion quote from a storyteller named Brother Blue. “We can never tell which two of us will become a critical mass and transform the future.”
In exchange for those quotes I gave Bob a copy of “The Blue Dirt of Paradise,” and suggested he read this essay I’ve written when I published it a few days later. He offered to buy the album, but I knew it was more valuable as a gift (even though they’ll probably become collector’s items). I had ordered ten copies from Travis when I saw him at Columbia Bank in Manzanita, several weeks after our Mohler chat. I was standing in line, preparing to deposit a wee wad of bills from my bookshop earnings. Travis was conferring with a nice manager, apparently troubleshooting something with another party over the phone. He walked over and I gave him part of the money. In return he delivered the records to my shop several days later, along with some books of poetry as a bonus.
That community bank (formerly Bank of Astoria) remains a special place for me. The whole space resonates with beautiful energy. In the early 2000s — as Roberto Bolaño was working to complete 2666 while awaiting a liver transplant, which never arrived — the building was erected and soon afterword received national acclaim from green design professionals. From beginning to end the construction process bore witness to common brilliance. Architect Tom Bender rocked, big time. His 15-page write-up is a work of art unto itself, as are his other books on design and economics that circle the margins of society’s pool of letters.
Tom confronts cancer as I write these words. Earlier in January, when we visited at his home, Tom spoke of potential plans for an end-of-life celebration. I told him I was working on this essay about creative flow, that I intended to end it with a description of a visit to Columbia Bank. I wanted to confirm that the structure’s central support post is in fact a Western Red Cedar.
The tellers said “probably,” but didn’t know, so I asked the person with a corner office. She didn’t know for sure either but directed me to a blue three-ring-binder in a pile of tourist and real estate info on the bottom of a rack next to a little spot to sit. She offered me a tissue to wipe a thick layer of dust off the binder (the contents of which I found later online, now linked for the second time here). And I sat and read, and I marveled at our oblivion amidst such glory. The following paragraphs riveted me.
“Work which employs and deepens our skills and which leaves tangible examples for our communities of what can be achieved through full use of our personal abilities enriches both us and our community. The interactive energy of work can leave us either fulfilled or empty. Every worker on this project left with new skills, a new sense of self-confidence and of personal and group achievement.”
“The core of sustainability is spiritual. Diseases of the spirit – lack of self-esteem, mutual respect, meaning in our lives, or being of value to our community – are endemic in our culture. Their healing requires we honor and nurture the emotional and spiritual well-being of all Creation. It requires open hearts; honoring the elements and forces of nature, the rhythms and cycles of life, the users of a place, and all of life. All work done with reverence enhances health and well-being.”
When I reminded Tom of his words, he poked himself forcefully in the chest, as if motioning toward a deep wound. Here is where demons test their reach after one pours out gifts and watches them disolve at the base of the empire’s pyramid, overlooked or forgotten. And there we were, a nationally acclaimed architect and a local forker of words, breathing together in the refined feng shui of his hand-crafted home with a stunning ocean view. I ached to belong to more healing, dreamed of helping more to spread the gold.
“Fuck the pyramid,” said Tom, and I concurred. We’ve gotten near enough to imagine doing it, climbed high enough up Maslow’s stairway of needs, aided by the handrail of privilege. Yet deliverance comes from beyond the bounds of status, out where Babylon looks small in relation to the horizon. Such perspective often falls to folks we barely notice, or give a wide berth. I aim to turn around and acknowledge those others, expand the flow of fellowship in our hinterland. May collective being breach social barriers here, and rise up in big cities too.
Daily routines offer chances to swim in this prayer. That bank in Manzanita is special for another reason. It’s where I ran into someone on the sidewalk out in front, after depositing my earnings from selling other people’s writing. The fellow had also just completed a transaction. At first I spaced out his name, even though he did handiwork for us many years ago. Since that time I’ve lazily called him by a nickname, based on an expression he might as well trademark because he’s the only person I know who uses it as a response to the existential quip of “how are you?”
“Hallelujah” he answers, often with a gritty zest that conveys gravity mixed with levity. And on that day Mark Nelson shared a story I shall not summarize, for it must come directly from the source. Just know that in a parallel reality Mark has a mother truckload of cash stashed at Columbia Bank, money he made when his story was made into a movie.
And here’s the deeper truth: any blockbuster retelling of what I experienced during that one-on-one encounter would be a watery derivative of the spirit that stretched between us, there on a patch of sidewalk that’s now kind of sacred to me. I often refer to this spirit as “muse,” though Federico García Lorca might call it duende. Hallelujah.
Mark stirs the music, along with Jennifer and Travis and Matt and Bradley and David and Rose and Jim and Bill and Blue and Tom and me and unnamed multitudes in life’s book of who’s who. For some blame reason I can’t whistle, and so am glad Travis carries that talent. One does what one can to fend off demons, circulating gifts for love and existential cures.
###
*Banksy would be the perfect filmmaker. I loved “Exit Through the Gift Shop.” He and his crew could chill at our farm. Jennifer and I would provide fresh goat cheese.
** “A Yellow Rose” is good quick reading, especially for anyone who frets over the link between existence and literature. In this short work Borges imagines a Borgesian writer who climbs to the pinnacle of fame, only to experience a mortal epiphany.
“Then the revelation occurred: Marino saw the rose as Adam might have seen it in Paradise, and he thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it; and that the tall, proud volumes casting a golden shadow in a corner were not — as his vanity had dreamed — a mirror of the world, but rather one thing more added to the work.” (Translated from the Spanish by Mildred Boyer.)
When I read that passage to Jennifer she immediately flashed on another floral view mirrored in “The Doors of Perception” by Aldous Huxley (1954, Chatto & Windus).
“At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively distance of its colors. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation – the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.”
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