Chickens and pigeons are both birds, but they’ve taken different routes to city living. It makes me laugh when we drive through town sometimes and a rooster struts across the road.
“I wonder why he did that?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” Danielle says. She doesn’t laugh at that joke anymore unless she’s laughing on the inside.
It’s May now and it’s hot and the big Cinco de Mayo festival is behind us and the town has settled back down into its cool groove. Every day I talk to people – new to town or visiting – who are shocked at the new, bustling Brownwood. A lady from out of town was gushing because she used to live in Brownwood and back then “there was nothing really to do.”
She was excited now, though, because there are shops and fun places and good food everywhere.
I gave her a quick rundown of all the other new opportunities for food, drink, and shopping downtown and she was just blown away.
“It’s like a little Fredericksburg without the traffic and the high prices!”
Progress is a funny thing. We are conflicted creatures.
The human animal is constantly pushing forward, trying to subdue earthly dominions and new technology is always being adapted to do it. Rousseau said, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” It is not beyond notice that even while man flattens the earth and paves it over and builds and ‘progresses’ his soul is always reaching backward. It is the reaching backward that is the revolutionary part – it is the fight against progress. It is the soul at war with the mind.
Notice that when New York City began to explode they built a huge park in the middle of it and acknowledged openly that without outdoor spaces the city dwellers would become animals again and violence would destroy the city. Notice that when America began to grow and spread and thrive in the postwar period Walt Disney went and built a huge park with castles and princesses and a main street that hearkened back to the nobility and the aristocracy over which America was supposed to have triumphed. It’s a constant reaching back. The carnal brain pushes forward, but the soul reaches back. Every downtown revitalization has to reach back even as it pushes forward. This goes back to our discussion about which art form is most beneficial to the rebirth of a city, and it’s always the art form that is neglected.
Chickens and pigeons are both birds, but they aren’t the same.
A bookshop is a repository of memory and history and as such, it is the storehouse and armory of all revolutions. It’s our communal hippocampus, neocortex, and amygdala. All the ideas the modern world wants to delete and all the memories the modern man wants to erase are warehoused in the innocent-looking bookshop.
Your e-books can be erased or forgotten when newer technology makes the old extinct. It’s newspapers we dig out when we try to remember, and not old laptops stacked in closets. The old ideas and facts they now tell you are all myths and legends are still there in the pages of encyclopedias and dictionaries and novels and books of history – mind-renewing in their reflective honesty. Solzhenitsyn said, “One word of truth outweighs the world,” and he was right.
Your murals will one day be painted over, and the music becomes more and more self-indulgent, but the pigeons don’t read the news or listen to air pods and they’ll still fly overhead to the green spaces our souls will always still require. Maybe none of that makes sense. Maybe it does.
Even as mankind seems to be rushing headlong into self-destruction and wreckers would take an axe to the root of civilization, the soul is always reaching backward. When people get sick of the news and the agitation and the fear-mongering and the constant division, they pack up some groceries and the kids and they go camping. They go float a river, or they take the RV out to the lake; little pretend green spaces that only temporarily give the soul respite. But there’s more that we want. As a species, we’re fleeing the big megacities to the small, beautiful little towns that are now awash with economic refugees searching for castles and princesses and a main street they remember from the before time.
There’s something to say here about the modern cult of narcissism and sociopathy. Everyone is bragging about how much they hate other people (randos) and never want to interact with them. I get it, but it is what it is. You think that way because your mind and your soul are sick. Sociopaths want homogeneity and anonymity. They don’t want to be confronted with the existence of their neighbor whom they are commanded to love. The part of the soul that is alive covets interaction and real friendship based on honesty and love. The diseased soul covets a bubble world where everyone who disagrees or has an unacceptable thought is banished – and nothing social is required of the individual other than tax-paying and a read exhibition of scorn and superiority… and the diseased man surrounds himself with midwit friends who give him what he demands and don’t judge. But even in those sociopaths, something stirs. Something calls back to a better time.
We’re all searching for Mayberry. Even Otis, the town drunk let himself into his cell every night and freed himself every morning. He needed someplace safe when the world around him got a little crazy. In the bookshop, they reach for Walter Scott or Cervantes or Victor Hugo, or… Michael Bunker. Economic refugees, too, will go into a bookshop and smile and remember and pick up a book. Maybe they’ll sit down in a little small-town pub today or in the park and they’ll read and maybe they won’t know that their reaching backward into history is a revolt against assimilation.
But maybe they will.
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear on Wednesdays and Sundays on the website.