So, I’ve set up a monthly blogging schedule that I’m trying to adhere to as a minimum of activity here at Words & Music by. . . . It goes like this:

• Every 1st Wednesday is writing about writing – book reviews and such
• Every 2nd Monday is a miscellany – whatever I feel like writing or thinking about
• Every 3rd Saturday is for song stories
• Every 4th Tuesday is my political musings

Today is the 4th Tuesday, so I’m thinking about this world. . . .

I’ve lived in the United States of America for nearly sixty-four years now, and I’ve been reading and teaching American writing and thinking — particularly from its beginnings through the end of the 19th century — for more than twenty-five of those years.

My American lit surveys–particularly the sophomore-level general education version–begin with indigenous creation stories and trickster tales before moving to the letters of Cristoforo Colombo, i.e., Christopher Columbus. From there, it’s on to the writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas and the American Puritans (including those we typically style as “Pilgrims”). My students and I then read from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, usually winding up with poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.

Having gone through some portion of these writings–in both undergraduate and graduate courses–every semester for, again, more than twenty-five years, I have come to believe that the one consistent American experience is that of decay.

Decay in all its not-so-varied noun and verb meanings:

• to decline in health, strength, or vigor
• to fall into ruin
• to decline from a sound or prosperous condition
• rot
• gradual decline in strength, soundness, or prosperity or in degree of excellence or perfection
• destruction, death [Merriam-Webster identifies this meaning as “obsolete,” but I think we have a good shot at bringing it back]

At one point in the first letter of discovery that Columbus sent back to the rulers on Spain in February of 1493, he writes, “Española is a marvel.” “Española” is the island that these days holds the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Then, just over ten years later, again writing to Spain, Columbus writes,

Of Española, Paria, and the other lands, I never think without weeping. I believed that their example would have been to the profit of others; on the contrary, they are in an exhausted state; although they are not dead, the infirmity is incurable or very extensive. . . . in destruction, everyone is an adept.

Letter to Ferdinand and Isabella Regarding the Fourth Voyage

Even Thomas Jefferson, one of the central Founding Fathers and whose face is one of those that desecrate sacred Lakota land in the Black Hills of South Dakota, recognized the experience of decay–and recognized it very early on. In 1780-81, in the midst of our fight for independence from England, Jefferson wrote,

From the conclusion of this war [the American Revolution] we shall be going down hill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion.

Query XVII [on religion] from NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA [composed 1780-81; published 1787]

The United States of America has decayed to the extent that it’s no longer even half of what it thinks itself to be. And if the USA is supposed to be–as it thinks it is–God’s gift to the world, it is now a cheap knock-off of the nation initially imagined, of the nation it might have been if it’d been able to fend off the inevitable decay.

As Emily Dickinson wrote,

I reason we could die–
The best Vitality
Cannot excel Decay,
But, what of that?

Second stanza of her poem 403

On Thursday evening, Leesa and I attended a local literary event. Atlas Books hosts poets and writers once a month at Johnson City’s Dos Gatos, and this month Davis Shoulders of Atlas welcomed poets Thomas Alan Holmes and Susan O’Dell Underwood to the Dos Gatos stage. Alan read from his first collection of poetry, In the Backhoe’s Shadow, published by Iris Press, and Susan — generally known as a poet — read from her first novel, Genesis Road, published by Madville Publishing. And there’s the tie-in to my song, “Genesis Road.”

As is often the case in these modern days, I’d never met Susan in person until Thursday, although we’d been online “friends” for a couple of years. Several months before her novel’s publication, she learned that I had a song with the same title as her upcoming novel. I don’t remember at this point whether Alan told her about it or I did, but Susan and I were joking in a message thread that she should use it as her intro song when she went out for readings to promote her book. While that didn’t happen for her entire book tour, we made it so on Thursday. Alan read from his beautiful and humorous collection to kick things off, and then he and I played “Genesis Road” to welcome Susan to the stage for her reading.

Song and novel are different in content, but Susan and I got our titles from the same place. If you drive I-40 between Knoxville and Nashville (or vice versa), as you enter (or leave) the vicinity of Crossville, TN, you pass Exit 320 for State Highway 298 / Genesis Rd / Crossville. I don’t know how often Susan has seen that sign in her travels, but I saw it lots in the years when I lived in Nashville and traveled many times between there and my home in Walnut, NC. I’m sure that one of the first sightings of the sign I must have flipped open my notebook and written down the road name.

But I was nearing the end of my time in Nashville before I wrote the song. I began with the title and then scoured my notebook for bits and pieces I might use in writing the lyric. The only bit I remember from this part of the process is coming across these lines that became the beginning of the second verse:

But it’s the same sky here,
Painted blue and white,
Sequenced traffic lights
Sequenced day to night.

I remember writing this in Lexington, KY, where I and my friends Noel and T. Michael had gone to pick up scalper tickets for one of Bruce Springsteen’s ’80s tours–either for Born in the U.S.A. or Tunnel of Love. I remember sitting in the car parked facing the street outside some store or other that Noel and T. Michael had gone in to look for one thing or another. The afternoon sky was blue and dotted with cotton-ball clouds. A Lexington street stretched out in front of me, a line of traffic lights changing from green to yellow to red. And then came the lines. Pretty simple, really.

The main happening that brought my Nashville years to a close was reuniting with Leesa after many years apart. At some point as we moved through reunion toward marriage, I knew that I would leave Nashville and return to the North Carolina mountains, specifically to Asheville, where Leesa lived with her son Lane and worked at a major salon. Again, the idea of such a return wasn’t solely related to our physical reunion. I’d been thinking about it. Even though the writing of “There Was Always a Train” preceded that reunion by two or three years, you can still hear her living in the lyric. And before that, I’d reversed our situations in the lyric of “Dizzy from the Distance.” Then, of course, there’s “Best I’ve Ever Seen” and “Homecoming.”

Musically, “Genesis Road” has a simple four-chord structure: C, F, Am, & G. It begins with a little musical hook in the C to F progression, in which the movement on the D-string is this note pattern: E > D > E > F. The song was one put together by the Cody band in those Nashville days (Mark Chesshir and Gene Ford on guitars, Steve Grossman on drums, and either Danny O’Lannerghty or Mark Burchfield on bass; probably Mark C. and Steve on background vocals). Gene Ford came up with the signature lick sings out over the C > F movement. Mark Chesshir took the lead on the breakdown after the first chorus, and Gene took over the lead from there to the third verse.

Genesis Road

We ran the Genesis Road.
We ran it hard and fast,
Living every day like the last,
No questions asked.
With the love of the open-hearted,
A love that knew no shame,
We staked our claim
And Eden it was named.
But something came creeping
Into the garden,
Whispering to my soul,
Telling me there was a bigger world
Than that woman and that lonely road.

But it’s the same sky here,
Painted blue and white,
Sequenced traffic lights
Sequenced day to night.
I see a lonesome star.
I see a tear-stained moon.
And far away somewhere
Those two also shine on you.
Baby, leave your window
And find a picture
Of the days when things were clear.
The smiling face beside you there
Is somber distanced from you here.

In the beginning,
We had it all —
Same sad story
That’s always been told.
Rose of Eden,
I hear you call,
Calling me back
Down the Genesis Road.

There are deeper rhythms in life
Than these driving my reckless pace,
And this mechanical human race
Is losing touch with grace.
You are a dancer in love
With the native rhythms I have left —
The rise and fall of your breast —
The beat of life itself.
Baby, set that rhythm as a beacon
I can feel and follow home.
I’ve left my winding way unmarked,
And there’s no returning on my own.

In the beginning,
We had it all —
Same sad story
That’s always been told.
Rose of Eden,
I hear you call,
Calling me back
Down the Genesis Road.

Here’s an interesting–I guess I can call it that–piece on Sanctuary Church, the 2022 version of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church from the 1970s.

“Gun Church That Worships with AR-15s Bought a 40-Acre Compound in Texas for Its ‘Patriots'”
The Rod of Iron Ministries has become more militant since leader Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon attended the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

If your church upholds (dare I say, worships?) ideologies that support–even promote–violence like that of the January 6, 2020, insurrection and aggressive, cancerous ignorance like the wicked conspiracy theories of QAnon, then your church probably has less to do with Jesus than with this lunacy: “It’s a dangerous time, and this is a place of refuge and retreat if our community needs it,” Moon said in one of his recent sermons, titled “The King’s Report,” which he typically delivers wearing a crown made of bullets and a golden AR-15 displayed before him.

About a month has passed since I encountered a black bear on the Loop Trail at Wildacres Retreat in North Carolina. I keep thinking about it. Sometimes my thoughts are about what a cool moment that was, the two of us on the trail, looking at each other for a few moments, then turning in our opposite directions and continuing on our separate paths through life.

But this morning, the bear visitation came with that sort of breathless, What if . . . ? What if this bear, which I took to be a young adult, decided that it didn’t like having me in its woods? What if, instead of turning and ambling off in the opposite direction, it had turned and come toward me?

Even though these and other What Ifs didn’t happen, those thoughts–those imaginings–still take my breath away, just a little bit. I don’t know what I would have–could have–done in response. No stick. No bear spray. No forest-ranger knowledge about what to do. So, I imagine this . . .

. . . until I tamed it — or not. And then I laugh and go on along my path, hoping that somewhere up on the Wildacres mountain the bear is doing the same.