Train a'commin'

One of the nice things about my studio, one of the pleasurable things; one of those things that don't figure in settling on some place, but that afterwards, when I've settled in, during the course of living there, I discover and take pleasure in: one of those nice things is that the rail road tracks are near by and that trains still travel on these tracks. I enjoy that while I am painting I can hear the blare of the horn, the dissonant interval announcing the arrival and passage, of a freight. When I hear this I can walk out of my studio, and since my cubical is right near the door, I can walk out and witness the mighty engines pulling the heavy cars: pulling sometimes coal, sometimes metal, sometimes unknown materials - but I suspect highly secret materials: perhaps remnants of a UFO crash; perhaps secret government labs run by animal/human hybrids, who are even now engineering the defeat of global capitalism; perhaps relics of a lost civilization (not lost the way America is lost, but lost in the sense of being misplaced by time). When I hear these trains I put down my brush (actually I carry my brush outside with me) or I put down my book, my Kierkegaard, my Barth, my Ricouer, and I venture outside to stand on the hot concrete and watch this train pass on through town. I watch as cars take the short cut for the trestle. I watch as I realize trains today no longer carry a caboose. I remember cabooses. I remember when passenger service still thrived, when people took a train from the depot in Covington for jobs and shopping in Atlanta. All the depots I know of have been transformed into restaurants or left to shambles. Even hobos have no place on modern trains. What a sad people we've become. We've become a sad people who have sad trains: and no amount of indignant protesting will change that: we've become a sad people ruled by our greed. Our trains are witness against us. They are now bland utilitarian affairs, sawed off from their history, and they travel through our cities like a punch in the gut. Even the vagrants no longer call them home.
My dad worked for the railroads in that section that became Railroad Publications: it was called Southern Freight and Tariff Bureau when he started work there in 1969. He told me that they called it Southern Frightened Giraffe Bureau at the office. When he began they had offices in San Francisco, San Antonio, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Roanoke. Over 200 people worked at the Atlanta office. When he retired around 2000 all operations had been consolidated into Atlanta and there were less than 50 people working there. Now I think all their work is done on a computer in some back room by two guys. Deregulation and automation: what grand things. And of course the world is better now: I should say it's more predatory now. A stock market over 13000 is a sign not of our goodness as a nation, not of how ennobled with mercy we've become, not of learning the "lessons of Vietnam" - but it is a sign of how much we value predation, and it is a sign of how far we have to fall. How can I be so pessimistic? Well no where in scripture does God reward a nation so proud of itself as ours with anything less than destruction, calamity and exile. It's coming. Not in a Left Behind kind of scenario but more in an Ozymandias kind of desolation: Look on ye capitalist and despair. Even if we didn't have scripture the weight of history is against us now.
One last thing about trains: when Jami and I visited her folks up in Cleveland, TN, we slept upstairs. Her niece slept in the other room. Grace is three and wonderfully expressive. In the middle of the night she came into our room, crying "aunt Jami, I heard a train." Jami claims that Grace was referring to my snoring, as if my nasal intonations attain a high decibel level, perhaps comparable to a train. Well you can hear a train from their house. When I told Jami that I could hear a train and that perhaps Grace was not frightened by me but by the distant echo of the Norfolk and Southern, she just laughed and laughed. She railed at me, "Aunt Jami, I heard a train."