A little while ago, some of those
friends who were accusing me of writing books less well than I write rock and
roll songs were also kind enough to tell me there was not much rock and roll in
this one.
They are probably right, because
this book is about me and my friends and the women I loved before I met the
young girl I'm about to marry, whose blue eyes and red hair may well be the
death of me. But for the benefit of
anyone who never heard one of my songs or read the notes on any of my record
albums, I would like to say a few things here, before we start out toward the
first edition of the floating opera.
A lot of the same people who accused
me of writing books less well than I write rock and roll also accused me of
confusing all the times and the flow of time and the interactions of the
different times, and they too are probably right, because I don't believe that
time is, or that time has to be, or even that time ought to be as regular as
distance in a Flemish painting.
I think every moment in the past is
just as distant as the last breath I have taken, and they are all equally
unreachable and far away, because things
grow at different speeds.
But sooner or later they all end up
in the magic realm of Maybe Once and Sir, If Only, where it's all unreachable,
it's all imagined – like the naked lunch tomorrow and the voice, Carl Phillips,
which can sing inside your head.
When I was starting on this book, I
wanted to begin with a little picture of the way Middleville, Virginia, looked
when I lived there, which was pretty much the same time as all of the events
described in this book – about ten years ago – and I started that way more than
once. I wrote about how beautiful the
dogwood and the redbud are each spring at the time of the Dogwood Festival, and
how Thomas Jefferson used to live outside of town on a little mountain when He
was alive, and how the Blue Ridge Mountains sometimes looked all blue and hazy,
like they might be islands floating on the sea of Earth, but I kept getting
stuck.
Then my omniscient friend suggested
that I might want to start at the end of the book, as is commonly done by
European authors, according to this person; so for a couple of weeks I tried
starting the book by describing the way my next door neighbor, Christian Gehman,
is riding around and around and around his gigantic front lawn on his beloved
Gravely tractor here in Cismont, Virginia, but I kept getting stuck at that end
of the story too.
However, some good came of the
attempt, because those two words – beloved
Gravely – kind of got fixed in my mind, and after I had written them what
seemed like several thousand times, they took on an unnatural significance.
By then I was so sick of the project
I would gladly have forgotten the whole idea, only I had promised a certain blue-eyed young lady I was going to write it all
down.
And if you break your promises you
lose your soul.
So I was sitting on my porch one
afternoon, listening to Christian's tractor go around and around and around,
and I was thinking about how much I hate Gravely tractors, because they're all
the same and they all try to thump you with those wicked handlebars. I used to have a Gravely tractor of my own,
and it tried to kill me more than once before I blasted it with Spook's old
Purdey shotgun.
And if you don't believe me you can
see the rusting carcass in the woods behind my house.
So I was listening to Christian's
tractor and falling asleep when suddenly it occurred to me that I did not have
to start at the beginning of the story, like an American writer, and I did not
have to start at the end, like Europeans do; I could start in the middle
anywhere I wanted to start if that made it come any easier, and after a while,
if I had been doing it right, nobody would care where I had started as long as
the story could walk and talk all by itself.
Acting on this principle I kept
those words – beloved Gravely – because by that time I believed thy sounded
mystifying and momentous and majestic.
I wrote them at the top of every page, and it was just like magic. Just as soon as I stopped trying to do
things in a particular way – just as soon as I didn't have a single idea in my
head, the way I do when I am writing a new rock'n' roll song – why, I thought
of something else to write down, and then I thought of another thing, and
another, and pretty soon I was clipping along without ever having mentioned
once upon a time.
Some of you will probably be glad to
know that this book is not written in dialect or spelled funny, and I hope you
believe I did my best to make it easy to understand. I really did. I changed
it completely so many times that my eyes wore out and I had to buy new
spectacles.
Fortunately, I had kept a copy of it
just the way it was when I first wrote it down, and, with a few minor additions
and corrections that my omniscient friend suggested, that version is what you
have already begun to read.
