Mystery of the Foggy Dew
A Spooky Tale of Stone County, MO
My grandmother, folklorist May Kennedy McCord, told me as a boy that the hillfolk were superstitious about an old ballad she sang called "The Foggy Dew." They associated it with an Ozarkian tale that a few oldtimers could see "another world" out there beyond familiar surfaces -- through the dew. As it turns out, my fisherman father was one of them.
Swan Creek
He was always gazing up into the trees as though, I fancied, he could somehow see fish out there. My little sister noticed it too. The old man finally admitted he'd been seeing a gorgeous garden of auras (at the level of subsurface appearances where matter is spun from sheer energy. When the brain adjusts to a wider spectrum of visible light, evidently, about anyone can see it.)
Beehive
Growing up enabled me to start glimpsing the subsurface garden myself. The auras appear in forms configured by the grotesque motif that dominates tribal art. It can be downright frightening, for example, when every tree starts resembling some transparent totem pole; with thunderbirds and, yes, fish heads all around in a grand array of anthropomorphic form.
It amounts to a parallel world (actually "out there") composed with intersecting lines like tiny rainbows of ethereal color. Again, the material world is spun -- manifestly -- from these luminescent looms made of sheer energy. (Rather like forest cobwebs shimmering in sunlight.)
Spider Hall
If physicists could learn to see these force fields themselves -- using my paintings perhaps as the scientific models intended -- they might unify their verbal / mathematical conjectures about energy and matter. (Maybe even see how to tap that energy and phase out fossil fuels.)
Smokehouse Wood
Moreover we can behold the big picture from which Plato sketched physical reality peeling off into levels of appearance. His was more of a direct description than scholars have yet imagined; overcomplicating the matter, as they do, with "metaphorical" speculations. (You can't figure out Plato's riddles with words alone. What he was describing must be seen.)
We palefaces can accordingly re-orient ourselves to depths of physical reality that've been spookin' us. We tend to relate glimpses of them to that catch-all word -- evil -- with which we label about anything unknown. But it needn't be that frightening. The subsurface world is glorious. A spiritual re-acquaintance with it could be the spark to make human civilization click.
Jim
McCord
Stone County MO.
September 29, 2000
Hooten Town Arch
Ramparts(the bluff at Horse Creek)
The Sonoma Mountains