A600AASS Day 3 - Agen to Léon
16.10.22
1000 Km (or thereabouts)
There's a crow flying
Black & ragged
Tree to tree
He's black as the highway that's leading me
A sinister opening to Joni Mitchell’s Black Crow, Jaco Pastorious’ relentless fretless bass might have been the soundtrack to much of my day. It marked a futile race against time. I missed the bus I’d hoped to catch. But, sat here on another bus, somewhere between Burgos and Valladolid in Spain, I can’t get Jaco’s driving death march out of my head.
I said goodby to the 600, a slipped cam chain not far from the realm of possibility, and checked in to the third hotel I’d booked for that night. The first room smelt overwhelmingly of sewerage. The second had someone else’s hair on the bathroom floor. I was beyond caring and just needed a place to write and sleep. I took the room with the hair.
I wrote last night that I feel empty, but I think that the truth is a little more complicated than that, and the physiotherapist knows it.
Equanimity is something for which I have a bit of a reputation. People and organisations have come to me in moments of crisis because, at the very least, I seem to offer them a calm head and, when required, a caring heart. I can help them weather the storm and see clear to a solution or two.
But where do I draw the line between equanimity and emotional condensation, when the vapour of running hot cools against the glass because it can’t find a way out?
I’m not empty. I’m full to bursting with the lid jammed on tight.
Emovare. To move. To let it pass through.
“What do you see in your imagination?” the physio asked. “A stream”, I said. “Scrunch the emotions up and let them flow away on that stream”, she said, gently.
I took the ferry to the highway
Then I drove to a pontoon plane
I took a plane to a taxi
And a taxi to a train
Jaco’s bass and Joni’s black crow again.
Although I didn’t take a plane or a ferry to reach Bilbao, I did take a train, three taxis, and a rental car. I’ll eventually take two busses to get from there to Léon. By the time I arrive later tonight, I’ll have travelled over a thousand kilometres.
I landed quickly in Amsterdam because, after 15 years of trying to find myself out there, I was finally starting to be happy where I was in here. The search was coming to an end and I thought I’d be able to settle in to an impending middle age. With that course now deranged, the refuge of the road again offers me a place to empty my head.
One of the greatest bass players the world has ever known, Jaco was also a heroin addict and suffered from bipolar. This doubled-edged-sword way of being was the source of his intense creativity and was also his undoing. Before his diagnosis, he attributed his behaviour to a desire to be free from constraint, but the addiction was more likely a salve for the discomfort he felt at being in the world.
And a salve, maybe, are days like this for me.
Keep moving.
Just keep moving.
Revel in the road and the rail and the air beneath you and inside you.
Whatever you do, don’t let the feelings catch up.
But they will, and they must, and when they do, I’ll do my best to welcome them in.