Thursday, September 5, 2013

(from an article by Marge Debussy, great-great granddaughter of the famous composer)

"...confession: our white-water rafting guide Ustava is a person who once assumed the guise of a young Johnny Appleseed, which she apparently decided to do after learning about the tricks of Rosalind and Celia in Arcadia National Park back in the 80's.  Her real name was allegedly along the lines of Joan Claribel Chapman. Nobody is entirely sure where she came from.

She and her beloved snow leopard Turtledove wandered well beyond the orchard's periphery with no sense of a clear starting point or fixed destination.  The seasons whirled around them.  The cycles were relatively familiar.  The cool of autumn began to erode the stagnant pool of summer, and in return was reduced to splinters by the black and brown bears of winter, who had spent weeks and months gathering insulation and lantern oil, and carefully studying texts like The Existential Burrow Patiently Carved Out By Franz Kafka's Long Distance Cycling Coach.  (Note: If her name was not Paula Bunyan or Rogera Waters it would have been something else, naturally.  Things and people need names.  Identification Science is a Helpful Science that should never be underestimated.)

We only begin to share these strange things at this particular juncture, untoward as they may or may not seem in this context, not because it is Apple Season, and not because the mariner Francis wants to melt into any other legendary, ancient disguise.  I accept the task I have now, which is to sort out the recycling.  This game preserve is as good an environment as any I've stumbled across in my cyberspace journeys.  That other person, simple Ustava, was happy indeed living the life of young John Appleseed for a summer. She thinks you might be also, if you ever decide to give it the old college try.  You probably think she's being ironic or whimsical but no, she takes basic education very seriously.  Ignoring the tabula rasa will only get you so far in this era.  

(Note: say for instance your inclination is to wander around alone for hours in primordial wilderness.  Say it, and Huckleberry Finn's avatar will most likely visit you in your dreams.  We hold to rigorous standards.  We are steadfast and reliable.  The declarative sentence sometimes appears out of nowhere, or the vapor, and is sometimes followed, inexplicably, by the interrogative sentence, or fragment, which is explained by many instructional videos easily searched for and enjoyed on a channel like Youtube.)

Yes, I interviewed Ustava, and she admitted to wishing that her intuition was stronger.  And yes, she hopes that certain parts of her character study will become more developed.  Is it simply a matter of quietly invoking the wisdom of a person like Buddha?  Time is still on her side, she thinks, despite what Syd Barret's agent said earlier about the Raft of Utter Abandonment.  He admitted later to being very melancholy when he imagined that forlorn device of the English, and besides, it doesn't even make linear or logical sense!  The fact that it got printed up in cheap newsprint brochures with all his other random musical improvisations is something art historians are shaking their heads about to this day..."