On L. Ron Hubbard, Friday Night Lights, and Eau Claire Washington
Fortified by corned beef hash and 40-weight oily coffee we hit the road once more. Needed to do some work so found a Starbucks in Eau Claire and sat down to it. The road and all those hours staring at flat land has a way of creating a silence hospitable to both demons and angels alike. Being on the road perhaps the greatest form of western meditation, aside from the action movie.
In any case I found myself sitting staring at an overweight woman sipping an iced latte speaking to what I presumed was her mother about the storage of rugs and wedding plans and various and sundry subjects – and found myself knocking around thoughts of less consequence than that but thoughts just the same that needed to follow their own course – on Eau Claire, which means clear water, and L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology and the need for its adherents to become “clear” – meaning working through past familial and personal relationships ad nauseum until they eventually hold no sway over your present day actions. And then you’re free to become Tom Cruise or a great director or whoever you choose to be. Dianetics obviously fraught and silly but still – there was something to that. The town of Eau Claire named when a couple French explorers were paddling down the rain-muddied Chippewa River and came upon the Eau Claire River and exclaimed “voici l’eau claire!” Funny how the mind runs in near unison with physical environment – I wonder if one of them decided then and there never to step foot in Versailles again.
Springing a few hundred years forward to that addicitive show Friday Night Lights. Their football team has a motto which, before each game, they chant in unison, before each touching a dirt-stained “P” for Panthers – the name of their team. “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.” The idea of becoming clear and clean inside, combining this with a heart that is full – learning that the heart actually has neurons inside it, and feels things before the brain makes sense of them. It means seeing what is in front of you sharply, and not through the lens of past trauma and hurt – full heart – those neurons charged and primed and ready – how the combination of these two things makes for invulnerability. It’s not unlike carpentry – if you have plumb and level then you must have square.
And then the line from the poetry of Jane Hirshfield – who washes her face in cold water each morning in order to “remember that the unwanted is wanted.” There is one person in particular who thinks I trust too much in what is difficult – but I grew up on Rilke and “Letters to a Young Poet.” In any case – the clearness. That is what I ache for – clarity. A limpid river after days of the rain-muddied Chippewa, the clarity of water so cold it hurts your teeth, freezes your logical brain, and whittles you down to that present full moment when there is nothing else to do but give give give.
It all made luminous sense – then that it began to rain on the green standing seam roof of the Starbucks, and the woman got off her cell and I took my plastic cup up to the counter thinking I was being helpful when the red-headed teenager behind the counter squinched up her face and said “ummmmm” in that special way teenagers can and I realized that it was my responsibility to throw the cup away. I needed to leave right then. And dog was all too happy to hit the road again.
