Nashville by Nightfall (continued)

Day II. Part II.
"We never actually slept in the Packard, but we'd stay at these places called tourist homes. Then they got these wonderful things called motels."
June Carter Cash


Something about mountain highways that makes me want to drive really really fast.
Must be the elevation, the gravity behind me as I descend at a sharp incline. With my Bible on the dashboard, I watch the odometer almost kiss the 100mph mark...and I ease off the accelerator. This is living. And there's not a cop around...barely even another car on the road. Eighteen wheelers roar and snort down the mountain, like dinosaurs bracing for extinction. I'm shaving off the miles to Nashville, and Ryan Adams' "Cold Roses" is on my stereo.


The Nashville skyline is comin into view, like Dorothy's Emerald City so full of promise and hope...so many illusions and thinly veiled wizardry. I'll be careful not to fall asleep in the poppies tonight. Nonetheless, I have some butterflies in the gut as the overhanging sky turns brush-burn-red and orange and slowly to bruised-fruit- blue.


The Athens of the South, The Protestant Vatican, The Buckle of the Bible Belt, Cashville, Music City, Nashvegas! The wide arms of the Cumberland River wrap round my imagination, like the haunting meditation of a pedal steel player, like a faith healer, it finds the ailment and offers balm...if you believe! Nashville, could I be home? Is your glitter as spurious and lackluster as the lacquer thin veneer of your modern songs? Cumberland River, sing me your sad story of glory come and gone. I have come in search of your knowledge, Nashville, I have come for blood. Is there a swollen heart still pounding in your comatose chest? Once your muses were red fox's with tails on fire, fleet footed and Nudie suited royalty wrapped in the violet robes of myth and brandishing six-string scepters and five-string swords! Your totems were copper-headed gods, feeding you like pelicans feed their young; with their own flesh. Our saviours from you came, plucked from Alabama cotton farms and Louisiana bayous by the very hand of the Almighty, and placed with tongues on fire in your mythic honky-tonks! Where have you buried your dead, Nashville? Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Snow, Lefty Frizzel, Sam Phillips, Hank Williams, Earnest Tubb, Patsy Cline, June Carter Cash, Maybelle Carter? Do the ghosts in the Ryman pews still wail? I have seen the mockery of those heroines and heroes images, set up on your graven tourist alters. Reminding those who still believe in American music that, yes, these men and women did stand here on these stages and uttered oracles, giving voice and two-step to the earthen stained common man. And twisting the dagger twice, reminding us by your cartoon fetish wax-museum minstrelsy, that our prophets live here no more. You have murdered your priests while they were still in the temple! You have lynched them with tourism and candy-coated CMT nooses! Priests with names like Perkins and Presley! If you could find a way to cheapen and commodify your own demise, if you're record companies were intelligent enough, you'd write a pop country song about it! You have taken even the silver dollars off the eyes of my heroes' corpses, Nashville! I have heard that your love has died, Nashville, and tonight your moon has no halo.


I check in to the hotel room, and plop myself on the sturdy mattress and swim off into a deep sleep...
This is what I dreamed: