First thing you learn is you always gotta wait.
- The Velvet Underground, “I'm Waiting for the Man”
Like it says in the Bible: To be absent from the body is to be present with God, to be absent from society is to be on a higher plain.
- Robert, hobo interviewed in Bill Daniel's
Who is Bozo Texino? film, riffing on 2 Corinthians 5:8
Before I begin on the second leg of our journey into the ways a poetics can be formed and transformed by riding freight trains and hitch-hiking, it is worth mentioning again that
hopping trains and hitching carry significant risk to life and limb, and should only be undertaken by experienced individuals or with an experienced individual as a sort of 'mentor.' More about the roughness of such modes of transport to come. For now, live free and ride hard!
*
If you recall the first of these posts, you'll remember that it dealt with transitory states, with movement, and how such states inform a poetics by leading the transient being out of him or herself, towards ineffability that becomes the material of poetry. What that first post left out is that traveling by freight also requires periods of stasis and rest, as one is always at the mercy of logistics— trains arrive or do not arrive based on innumerable factors both mundane and extraordinary, and even when they do arrive, there are not always rideable cars in which to stow away. Some amount of predictability is a given— certain trains with certain destinations leave from certain yards like clockwork— but oftentimes, there is some temporal mutability embedded in the massive infrastructure of arrivals and departures. Where that leaves the transient being is in a zone where movement is desired but cannot be undertaken, a space outside of typical temporal realities yet ultimately dependent on them. This Beckettian soil, with its awesome variety of constitutive elements, can fall under a number of different terms depending on its proximity to where trains stop, how the space is maintained, and whether it is an appropriate spot to bed down for a wink.
But what happens to the transient being when within these spaces, these idylls or nightmares or commingled oddnesses? How does this strange static territory inform a poetics?
Among the most fascinating aspects of the liminal spaces associated with the transitory state is that they can often be approached only through a weirdly rarefied reading of signs and symbols. For example, much has been made of the old
hobo sign language, an abbreviated version of which is reproduced below:
Sadly, the use of such codes is rare in today's world, but the transient being's precise reading of space can still be rewarded— the rail spike by the side of a road will point to a path that leads to a secluded spot under a bridge, a bent-up fence signifies what can often be a good entry point to a train yard, and a smattering of loose cardboard, soup and beer cans, and charred wood can show one a back trail to a friendly store where one can pick up water and other necessary supplies. What happens as one travels is that a new way of connecting signifiers to signifieds emerges, and thus, liminal territories that are usually overlooked are opened up, and a shrouded language is brought out of the shadows to be stored within the transient being's argot cache.
Once arrived in these transitional spaces, however, the traveler is caught within their circumstances. Thus, for every leafed woody perch beside a gurgling brook, there is the underside of a highway overpass where dirty rigs and broken glass clutter choking dust, and for every tranquil oak-studded rural country trail, there is a mess of barbed wire with sirens and gunshots clattering on nearby streets. Yet despite these obvious contrasts, many such spaces share at least one similarity, and that is their remoteness— whether tucked into valleys ringed by mountains or crammed into the density of industrial plants and urban power centers, they are not locales that most people notice, let alone attempt to venture into. As such, the spaces yield the transient being a sort of shaky freedom, where the yoke of the job squad and the droning of the capitalist teletechnological matrix are not altogether present, though such unfortunate beasts might be mere footsteps away.
These liminal spaces, then, provide for an absence from society that is clarifying, for not only do they allow the transient being an unusual view of landscape sans much of the bemoaned visual clutter of our times, but they also allow for a receptiveness to possibilities concrete and cosmic. It seemed a joke, almost, that I first came upon Gary Snyder's “What You Should Know to Be A Poet” in an Olympia bookstore mere hours after I had hopped off a moving train in Tacoma. I sat, rapt, and let Snyder break down what we should know to be poets:
all you can know about animals as persons.
the names of trees and flowers and weeds.
the names of stars and the movements of planets
and the moon.
your own six senses, with a watchful elegant mind.
at least one kind of traditional magic:
divination, astrology, the
book of changes, the tarot;
the illusory demons and the illusory shining gods;
kiss the ass of the devil and eat shit;
fuck his horny barbed cock,
fuck the hag,
and all the celestial angels
and maidens perfum’d and golden—
& then love the human: wives husbands and friends.
children’s games, comic books, bubble-gum,
the weirdness of television and advertising.
work, long dry hours of dull work swallowed and accepted
and livd with and finally lovd. exhaustion,
hunger, rest.
the wild freedom of the dance,
extasy
silent solitary illumination,
enstasy
real danger. gambles. and the edge of death.
Having just eaten shit after half-falling off a slow-moving train, the last line of Snyder's poem struck me hardest as I read; after all, many too many freight-riders are missing digits or limbs from unfortunate (or idiotic) encounters with train cars, wheels, and tracks. But as I read the poem again (and again), I began to realize that Snyder's words portray the state of being transient in liminal spaces almost perfectly. Time spent in wooded or rural liminalities teaches “the names of trees and flowers and weeds/ the names of stars and the movements of planets,” and this knowledge is both practical and slightly esoteric. Such knowledge is in contrast with “the weirdness of television and advertising,” cognizance of which is necessary, but only insofar as one knows how to avoid its Mammon-like tentacles, a goal that is integral to the transient being's impulse in the first place.
Then there is the “
extasy” and “
enstasy.” The former is inextricably tangled with the reception of the ineffable, the “real danger” that the transitory state breathes. But the latter, the
enstatic, is what interests me most about the transient being's experience in liminal spaces. The aforementioned remoteness of such spaces can allow for withdrawal from the world, its jarring violence and teletechnology, and in the lack that sometimes results from such withdrawal, poetry can fruit. I often think of such emptying of the self as a washing-over, a tide of overwhelm that leaves little in its wake besides air entering and exiting the lungs, along with a sort of bare consciousness. It is akin to what St. John of the Cross writes of when he ends his
Dark Night of the Soul with “I went out from myself, and all things ceased.” While I claim no closeness to any deities, I find myself drawn to the liminal spaces, the enstatic spaces, not only because I feel the emptying affirms being at its most naked, but also because it eventually offers space for new ideas of creation to run without inhibitions of territory
“Coping Prana,” the final poem of
Will Alexander's
Compression & Purity, can be read as working in tandem with the idea of a life force existing in the margins, in the liminal spaces, in enstasis, and how this is a form of power. The poem details a putting-upon, an oppression that comes from the jive world of “dominance and capital,” to quote another Alexander poem. He writes that such forces are “always seeking to have me neutered beneath my derma/ so as to talk to myself/ so as to cancel my structureless scrutiny.” Their existence depends upon destruction of life, of neutering one's being so as to subsume one into a structure. He continues:
they speak of me as lawless
as despicable
as a typhoon in a sea well
as to morals
as to fixed & accelerated combination
they fix me
as deserted
bereft
as a fragment from a starving lion's compendium
I am considered
as pointless positron without image
as hieroglyph
as sundial
as martyr
being leakage from a barbarous index province
To be “deserted/ bereft,” to be “pointless positron without image,” this is to inhabit an emptiness, a remoteness that has an analog in the transient being's dwelling in the liminal. The “barbarous index province,” this is the monolith that has no room for energy and life power other than its own. Those who refuse to kowtow are squeezed out. You'll find us in the cuts, lawless and filthy and wild-eyed and in trance, letting our poems write themselves as they should.
- TED REES
Ted Rees is a poet and essayist who spends most of his time in West Oakland, California, but travels around the western US on a regular basis. His current work focuses on environmental degradation and the struggles of wage labor. Previous writings can be found in the Double Burst featurette with Jared Stanley (Supersuperette 2014), Michael Cross’ Disinhibitor blog, Small Press Traffic’s website, Eleven Eleven, Ragtag, and a number of other publications both online and off. His two chapbooks include Outlaws Drift in Every Vehicle of Thought (Trafficker Press 2013) and Like Air (BentBoyBooks 2012). Forthcoming are chapbooks from Mondo Bummer and BentBoyBooks. 
First thing you learn is you always gotta wait.
- The Velvet Underground, “I'm Waiting for the Man”
Like it says in the Bible: To be absent from the body is to be present with God, to be absent from society is to be on a higher plain.
- Robert, hobo interviewed in Bill Daniel's Who is Bozo Texino? film, riffing on 2 Corinthians 5:8
Before I begin on the second leg of our journey into the ways a poetics can be formed and transformed by riding freight trains and hitch-hiking, it is worth mentioning again that hopping trains and hitching carry significant risk to life and limb, and should only be undertaken by experienced individuals or with an experienced individual as a sort of 'mentor.' More about the roughness of such modes of transport to come. For now, live free and ride hard!
*
If you recall the first of these posts, you'll remember that it dealt with transitory states, with movement, and how such states inform a poetics by leading the transient being out of him or herself, towards ineffability that becomes the material of poetry. What that first post left out is that traveling by freight also requires periods of stasis and rest, as one is always at the mercy of logistics— trains arrive or do not arrive based on innumerable factors both mundane and extraordinary, and even when they do arrive, there are not always rideable cars in which to stow away. Some amount of predictability is a given— certain trains with certain destinations leave from certain yards like clockwork— but oftentimes, there is some temporal mutability embedded in the massive infrastructure of arrivals and departures. Where that leaves the transient being is in a zone where movement is desired but cannot be undertaken, a space outside of typical temporal realities yet ultimately dependent on them. This Beckettian soil, with its awesome variety of constitutive elements, can fall under a number of different terms depending on its proximity to where trains stop, how the space is maintained, and whether it is an appropriate spot to bed down for a wink.
But what happens to the transient being when within these spaces, these idylls or nightmares or commingled oddnesses? How does this strange static territory inform a poetics?
Among the most fascinating aspects of the liminal spaces associated with the transitory state is that they can often be approached only through a weirdly rarefied reading of signs and symbols. For example, much has been made of the old hobo sign language, an abbreviated version of which is reproduced below:
Sadly, the use of such codes is rare in today's world, but the transient being's precise reading of space can still be rewarded— the rail spike by the side of a road will point to a path that leads to a secluded spot under a bridge, a bent-up fence signifies what can often be a good entry point to a train yard, and a smattering of loose cardboard, soup and beer cans, and charred wood can show one a back trail to a friendly store where one can pick up water and other necessary supplies. What happens as one travels is that a new way of connecting signifiers to signifieds emerges, and thus, liminal territories that are usually overlooked are opened up, and a shrouded language is brought out of the shadows to be stored within the transient being's argot cache.
Once arrived in these transitional spaces, however, the traveler is caught within their circumstances. Thus, for every leafed woody perch beside a gurgling brook, there is the underside of a highway overpass where dirty rigs and broken glass clutter choking dust, and for every tranquil oak-studded rural country trail, there is a mess of barbed wire with sirens and gunshots clattering on nearby streets. Yet despite these obvious contrasts, many such spaces share at least one similarity, and that is their remoteness— whether tucked into valleys ringed by mountains or crammed into the density of industrial plants and urban power centers, they are not locales that most people notice, let alone attempt to venture into. As such, the spaces yield the transient being a sort of shaky freedom, where the yoke of the job squad and the droning of the capitalist teletechnological matrix are not altogether present, though such unfortunate beasts might be mere footsteps away.
These liminal spaces, then, provide for an absence from society that is clarifying, for not only do they allow the transient being an unusual view of landscape sans much of the bemoaned visual clutter of our times, but they also allow for a receptiveness to possibilities concrete and cosmic. It seemed a joke, almost, that I first came upon Gary Snyder's “What You Should Know to Be A Poet” in an Olympia bookstore mere hours after I had hopped off a moving train in Tacoma. I sat, rapt, and let Snyder break down what we should know to be poets:
all you can know about animals as persons.
the names of trees and flowers and weeds.
the names of stars and the movements of planets
and the moon.
your own six senses, with a watchful elegant mind.
at least one kind of traditional magic:
divination, astrology, the book of changes, the tarot;
the illusory demons and the illusory shining gods;
kiss the ass of the devil and eat shit;
fuck his horny barbed cock,
fuck the hag,
and all the celestial angels
and maidens perfum’d and golden—
& then love the human: wives husbands and friends.
children’s games, comic books, bubble-gum,
the weirdness of television and advertising.
work, long dry hours of dull work swallowed and accepted
and livd with and finally lovd. exhaustion,
hunger, rest.
the wild freedom of the dance, extasy
silent solitary illumination, enstasy
real danger. gambles. and the edge of death.
Having just eaten shit after half-falling off a slow-moving train, the last line of Snyder's poem struck me hardest as I read; after all, many too many freight-riders are missing digits or limbs from unfortunate (or idiotic) encounters with train cars, wheels, and tracks. But as I read the poem again (and again), I began to realize that Snyder's words portray the state of being transient in liminal spaces almost perfectly. Time spent in wooded or rural liminalities teaches “the names of trees and flowers and weeds/ the names of stars and the movements of planets,” and this knowledge is both practical and slightly esoteric. Such knowledge is in contrast with “the weirdness of television and advertising,” cognizance of which is necessary, but only insofar as one knows how to avoid its Mammon-like tentacles, a goal that is integral to the transient being's impulse in the first place.
Then there is the “extasy” and “enstasy.” The former is inextricably tangled with the reception of the ineffable, the “real danger” that the transitory state breathes. But the latter, the enstatic, is what interests me most about the transient being's experience in liminal spaces. The aforementioned remoteness of such spaces can allow for withdrawal from the world, its jarring violence and teletechnology, and in the lack that sometimes results from such withdrawal, poetry can fruit. I often think of such emptying of the self as a washing-over, a tide of overwhelm that leaves little in its wake besides air entering and exiting the lungs, along with a sort of bare consciousness. It is akin to what St. John of the Cross writes of when he ends his Dark Night of the Soul with “I went out from myself, and all things ceased.” While I claim no closeness to any deities, I find myself drawn to the liminal spaces, the enstatic spaces, not only because I feel the emptying affirms being at its most naked, but also because it eventually offers space for new ideas of creation to run without inhibitions of territory
“Coping Prana,” the final poem of Will Alexander's Compression & Purity, can be read as working in tandem with the idea of a life force existing in the margins, in the liminal spaces, in enstasis, and how this is a form of power. The poem details a putting-upon, an oppression that comes from the jive world of “dominance and capital,” to quote another Alexander poem. He writes that such forces are “always seeking to have me neutered beneath my derma/ so as to talk to myself/ so as to cancel my structureless scrutiny.” Their existence depends upon destruction of life, of neutering one's being so as to subsume one into a structure. He continues:
they speak of me as lawless
as despicable
as a typhoon in a sea well
as to morals
as to fixed & accelerated combination
they fix me
as deserted
bereft
as a fragment from a starving lion's compendium
I am considered
as pointless positron without image
as hieroglyph
as sundial
as martyr
being leakage from a barbarous index province
To be “deserted/ bereft,” to be “pointless positron without image,” this is to inhabit an emptiness, a remoteness that has an analog in the transient being's dwelling in the liminal. The “barbarous index province,” this is the monolith that has no room for energy and life power other than its own. Those who refuse to kowtow are squeezed out. You'll find us in the cuts, lawless and filthy and wild-eyed and in trance, letting our poems write themselves as they should.
- TED REES
Ted Rees is a poet and essayist who spends most of his time in West Oakland, California, but travels around the western US on a regular basis. His current work focuses on environmental degradation and the struggles of wage labor. Previous writings can be found in the Double Burst featurette with Jared Stanley (Supersuperette 2014), Michael Cross’ Disinhibitor blog, Small Press Traffic’s website, Eleven Eleven, Ragtag, and a number of other publications both online and off. His two chapbooks include Outlaws Drift in Every Vehicle of Thought (Trafficker Press 2013) and Like Air (BentBoyBooks 2012). Forthcoming are chapbooks from Mondo Bummer and BentBoyBooks.