The Hammock Papers: Darrell Scott, "The Miracle of Living"

05 October 2011

Darrell Scott, "The Miracle of Living"

He left Boston in December for New Mexico
Determined to forget all of the faces he’d known
A little lonesome in a world of troubled mind

With a bed roll on his shoulder and a banjo on his knee
He would hitch a ride with truckers
He believed them to be free
Eighteen-wheelers roll a little further down the line

He did not meet a girl in Richmond nor in old San Antone
His vision of the Southwest would be realized alone
Alone to wonder
how his life had gone thus far

As he walked along the highway
He felt a power from inside
He found a miracle of living
In having nothing left to hide

He walked Carlsbad to White Sands
For forty days and nights
But it only took ten minutes for that man to realize:
Lord, it’s lonesome everywhere

Now he’s living back in Boston teaching English in high school
Glad to have bi-weekly wages
Glad the kids all think he’s cool
He’s a man who has learned from where he’s been

He keeps a bottle full of white sand on his table down the hall
And a worn map of New Mexico thumb-tacked on the wall
Oh, you never know
He may need to go again

As he walks along the hallway
He feels that power swell up from inside
And finds a miracle of living
In having nothing left to hide

Oh, it’s a miracle

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL