This summer I learned a song that has become my flagship: Kris Kristofferson’s “To Beat the Devil.”
I didn’t know then where the song would carry me, but one of the ports has been resigning from my job at RN Market. For five summers and four winters I have served this community, for better and for worse, at Checkstand One. I am grateful for all I’ve learned about our people and for the friendships I’ve gained with customers and co-workers. To those I have aggravated or hurt in some way, I humbly apologize for taking out on you the normal hardships of employment.
But there was another source of aggravation I didn’t see amongst the cans of hominy and cases of beer. I didn’t know I was wrestling an angel in disguise as the devil. That devil is one every artist has to stare down: the despair of ever being heard. With my work on land, through research and essays, photographs and poems, I’ve trumped that guy over and over again, but he always comes back for more. When I signed on at RN, I was taking a break from fighting - or so I thought - while waiting for the opportunity ship to dock.
With the emergence of the West of West Center, celebrated last week in Fresno, I think that time has arrived. There was something new in the mix of people who attended the opening/book signing. One friend said it felt like being in an estuary, that place where rivers meet and mix with saltier water from the ocean, a new environment for organisms from both sides of the salt/fresh water divide. Estuaries are very productive ecological zones, and I think Mark Arax’s intuitions about pooling people from both sides of another kind of divide - the old wealth of the Valley and the longstanding critics of inequality - are going to be fertile, if also delicate.
Last week, while suffering round two of the crud, I sat and read an article in the July/August Smithsonian a dear friend had sent me. The article described the current economic devastation in the rural South, as overwhelming to residents as it is baffling to onlookers from outside: the loss of agricultural jobs to mechanization, the loss of industry to Mexico and China, the highways bypassing small towns linking burgeoning urban centers.
It also mentioned the havens some of these small rural places have become for people who decide not to accept the inhuman conditions in urban areas, and ended with a brief description of a program in Arkansas helping people get back on the land where they can make a living from it as well as a life on it. That ending was a brief reprieve from the description of economic despair that preceded it, conditions not unrelated to our own.
“The devil haunts a hungry man,” sings Kristofferson near the conclusion of “To Beat the Devil.” “If you don’t want to join him, you got to beat him.” He pauses just long enough for the meaning to sink in, about wrestling that angel in disguise. Then he breaks loose with his re-write of the devil’s despair song:
“And you still can hear me singing to those people who don’t listen to the things that I am sayin’, prayin’ someone’s gonna hear. And I’ll prob’ly die explainin’ how those things that they complain about are things they could be changin’, hoping someone’s gonna care...”
See you around town!
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Trudy
Wischemann is a writer who has returned to self-unemployment status. You can send your devil-beating recipes to
her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
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