Who Was August West?

 As made famous in the 1971 Grateful Dead song 'Wharf Rat'?

Augustus West (1814 - 1887) was a real life runaway slave who in 1837 arrived in the area of Greenfield are of Fayette, County Ohio. With local farmer Alexander Beatty, West co-authored a story that has become a part of local history, and later part of the history of the underground railway, which undermined slavery from inside the USA. The story they co-authered was that to raise money for West to purchase his own land, West and Beatty devised a scheme to take West back south, sell West back into slavery, and then Beatty would help West escape. The pair would split the profits. The laws that regulated the slave markets were lax enough for them to run this scam on Southern slave owners a minimum of three recorded times before deciding not to repeat the scam any further. Their story became the foundation for a 1971 alternaive Hollywood cowboy film, 'The Skin Game', starring James Gardner and Louis Gossett, Jr.

West used his share of the profits to purchase land near the intersection of Bonner and Barrett Roads, in Fayette County, in the state of Ohio. Some distance from the road West built a big house, The dirt road leading up to his front door became known as Abolition Lane.

In the years that followed, at least twelve cabins were constructed on West's land. They became temporary residences for other runaway slaves who needed a place to live and work as they stole their way further north, to a sustainable freedom away from them and their decendents being the property of slave owners.

But in the Garcia/Hunter song 'Wharf Rat' what Augustus West could do for others, be a staging post for their route away from slavery into liberty, August West could not do for himself. He became dependent on the drink. Enter real life Methodist minister Purley Baker who was the head of the Anti-Saloon League, a temperance organization based in the U.S.A. until shortly before his death in 1924, aged 65. Illegal bars were sometimes named 'Purley Baker's', to give alcohol consumption a double false identity.

Who knew that in the 1971 song lyic that Purley Baker's was both the underground name for a bar, and name of the dry house where drinkers could feel they were a safe distance from the temptations of the alcohol, that they needed to avoid?

In the lyric August West expresses this confusion so neatly most listeners would not notice how well their ambivalence towards the lyriccould be made part of the scene that the song describes. From the underground railways that helped slaves escape to double identity of a Purley Baker's, the double identity of seeking to do good unseen, and unintentionally being exposed to disguised temptation has never been bettered.

Amongst followers of The Grateful Dead, Deadheads, a fanbase who were perhaps more in danger of falling victim of their addictions than fans of more mainstream music, there is a 12 step support group called 'Wharf Rats', who exist to be ready to help whoever needs the assistance and the time to clean up/dry out, and restart life 'clean from addiction', though temptation will remain.

The Less Attractive Face Of Traddition

could not look less welcoming than in recent updates
by The Taliban in  Afghan marriage laws, that in the process
give men, and the groom's family, even more power
over who they can choose to marry than they had before.
And give women even less choice when they are chosen
 in arranged marraiges than they have had in all previous
Taliban-legislated marriage rules, designed to make women
invisible in an already severly imbabanced male-led society.
 

 

The Restless Reader

When did you last buy a newspaper? 
Yes, buy, rather than read, a newspaper?

Newsprint, and it's corollary advertising,
are now much more consumed online,
than they are in physical print. On the screen
the proprietors of print can make what they own
sing and dance in front of readers, making it harder
for readers to focus on what is being said.
Harder to remember what was written after,

particularly the screen automatically scrolls
to the next item, all too soon immediately after. 

If you are going to be a restless reader
give your eyes the breaks they need
and take a rest from all the media filler
the better to remember what you have read after.

The Old Quandary

is what to think and say
when cynicism wins the day,
and reality outruns you
as people you once admired 
show the way forward
in ways that you could not imagine .......   

A Former Ghost Writes

In former times I half-knew it, when I went to places
where conversation did not happen, no words described
what I, and others who were present, were there to find. 
My itch was observed, and reduced in the sharing of it.
Silently, for the duration of each frequent short visit. 

The place I went to quietly passed itself off
as a place of temporary mutuality
of a type I, otherwise, could not find. 

Even as I knew there were names for where I went
and what I did there, the blanket of silence fell heavy
on those I lived with who bade the words not be spoken.
Which was why I had the itch that made me seek such respite.
The life I led using the apporved of unhelpful language
could be survived but would not cure me of my itch,
where the lack of words made me seek temporary relief,
and left me seeking temporary relief seemingly forever.

After over a decade in this silence, and a few years
away from family, I started writing to myself - to ask
where the blanket of silence began, tracking it back
near and nearer to where it started, along with how
different absences of words meant different things.

From a place of unconscious isolation
I wrote about my then present situation
to find, for seemngly the first time,
a wider conscious sense of choice.

What I did then is now called Journaling
When I was writing I called it scribbling.
Over eighteen intense months the weight
of the blanket of silence slowly lifted from me, 
revealing the language of taboo underneath
most of  which began with a new reading of my family.

Was I any less of a ghost at the end? Sort of.
I was not the ghost my family wanted me to be.

The old itch pressed far less,
such that I felt nearly no need
for the silent/secretive respite
I had needed in the past.

But I did not feel complete as a person
in average ordinary, inclusive, conversations.
I was also slow to grasp that 'restored' as I was
there was no compensation for where the silence,
and the years of seeking relief from the itch, had left me.

The best I can say is that I have a renewed respect
for those whose sense of care for others extends
to mental health and personal development matters,
shared in taboo-free vernacular terms: a wide field
of care that I now see as being sorely neglected. 

Picture Set Of The Month - July - The Paintings Of Gerard Dillon

'The Table in The Blue Room' an early painting
by Irish painter Gerard Dillon (1916 - 1971).
The seated man is most likely a self portrait.   

'Tory Island' as painted in 1947 by Irish painter
Gerard Dillon (1916 - 1971) from a sketch made
on holiday with his friend, fellow artist Daniel O'Niell.

  

'The Fisherman's Cottage' as painted in 1951
by Irish painter Gerard Dillon (1916 - 1971)
when Conamarra was a thriving place. 

'The Little Green Fields' as painted in 1945
by Irish painter Gerard Dillon (q1916 - 1971)

At The International Conference

for the unecessary experts
for how the next world war
would be run, the argument
was a simple enough to engage with:
'How vital are we going to be in this war
for the future when the wealth of the few
being only for the few depends so much on us playing our part?'

The consensus was with the chair
when the proposition was put to a vote:
'We must be central to this new war,
our future wealth depends upon it,
And the longer the war can prolonged
the more we frame the future that follows after.

Gentlemen here's to our future uselessness.'.