STOP AND PRAY! . . . On the road in North America.

Now there’s a sign that speaks to me! I’m all for stopping.
And praying? Yes, well of course, every step a prayer. . .
But I think the meaning of the board is something more akin
to pulling over for a quick spiritual fix like one picks up a bag
of burgers & fries.

Europeans, as they read about it, watch it on TV, or travel through
this brazen North American road show love this kind of in-your-face,
crass display of car culture. They like what they see as naiveté.
They like what they see as a kind of raw, makeshift culture—a sort
of liberation from the ponderous weight of 1000 year-old cathedrals—
on the tenuous edge of still-to-be-tamed wilderness.

Americans, in as far as I can tell, are more into kitsch. The word kitsch,
of course, comes to us via Yiddish from a dialect of German and means

“to scrape mud up from the street”
and from the verb kitschen,
“to slap together something, like a work of art”.

In America, there seem to be two species of this:

One is a what I think of as a kind of High-Low Culture, like the way the Dutch
fiddle player Andre Rieu performs the most tasteless and sentimental music
ever written, but does it with great panache and virtuosity. The other form
of kitsch is more in keeping with the above etymology of mud and dirt. It
is more a kind of cultivated badness or ugliness for ugliness’ sake. It is
the sort of metaphysics that places cow turds or soup cans in an art museum.
(Don’t forget I’ve worked for some 13 years on and off cleaning out barns in
the Swiss Alps, so I know how a shepherd looks at me when I tell him how
much money an artist makes for cow turds or soup cans in art museums...)
This way of looking at the world is starting to get close to the aethetics of
Rock-and-Roll, but is perhaps more contemplative or intellectual in, it seems
to me, a very superficial sense. It also largely lacks the loud, edgy,
four-square boom-boom-boom of rock’s raw sexual energy.

Are you confused by all this complexity? No matter. Maybe it’s time
then to stop & pray? I always say that walking, even if I have absolutely
no idea where I’m headed, forever seems to lead to some kind
of spiritual path.

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