Inside Track 004: AustinTown
now + here = nowhere
Austintown, OH, is the Rte 80 driving midpoint between New York City and Chicago.
Written election season 2004 in the Austintown Best Western off I80, in view of a Quaker Steak 'n Lube across the highway. 20-years on now. Crazy!
AustinTown the track begins with an image I had kicked around for a while back then of an archaeological dig 10000 years in the future. Dinosaur bones are found next to an almost complete female human skeleton, in her hand a fossilized smartphone. Got me thinking that those future folks might conclude we actually walked with T-Rexes, not knowing they unearthed a tourist in a natural history museum’s prehistoric wing, frozen at the moment of an asteroid hit sometime around 2222AD.
Over a couple hours that night, I sat in bed “1/2-way between here and there,” at the time still penning songs on paper, and meditated on the truth. The lyrics spilled out, almost intact in its first draft.
The music came a week later on returning to Brooklyn. Fwiw, the melody and underlying chord changes of the verse and chorus are a loose synthesis of Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning, and the bridge, of Bruce Springsteen’s Hungry Heart, two tracks that always stop time for me.
The “1/2 way” chorus lyric was inspired by the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno, the inventor of the paradox. One of his most enduring postulates is that you can never get anywhere, for real, because you’re always 1/2 the distance away from your destination.
If school, say, is a 1 mile walk away, you’re 1/2-way there when you’ve gone 1/2 a mile. At that 1/2-mile mark, you’ll still be 1/2-way to school when you walk another 1/4-mile. At that 1/4-mile mark, you’ll still again only be 1/2-way to school when you arrive at the 1/8-mile marker. And then the 1/16-mile marker, the 1/32nd, 1/64th, ad infinitum.
So the present is a constant state of being 1/2-way to somewhere. The destination is irrelevant. All we have is the now and here.
That said…
now + here = nowhere.
Zeno’s paradoxes bent my mind when I first studied them in high school. At one logical extreme, there is the wondrous outcome where time stretches moments to infinity, such that nothing ever dies. The other logical extreme, however, is depressing AF. “Well we actually do arrive at destinations in this existence,” and thus this life proves infinity cannot exist.
In any event, this track was written before F-book and iPhones and influencers, and one could already look around and see (in a cold, non-conspiratorial fashion) that truth is malleable - just a frame. It’s not that the truth doesn’t exist, it’s that it’s a quantum uncertainty.
Like, we can see electrons in action, and now have the ability to pulse light at quantum speed, but we have yet to photograph one electron, frozen in time and space. We still do not have a camera sophisticated enough, and so cannot confirm something we know is there, but can never see with our natural perception. In this way, the “truth” of the electron, even if we manage to capture one, will forever be mediated by a machine. Quantum truth requires invention - “technological tricks,” as they say.
There are perhaps some truths we are never meant to confirm beyond our faith.
In the end, there’s your truth and my truth, and somewhere between us we find the truth.
Upstream, humanity is made of colliding truths. It’s your duty as a conscious being to keep your ears open.
In June 2012, I met John Kerry at a Montecito, CA wedding, and related to him how, in the shadow of his Presidential run, I wrote a song on the road in Ohio about truth and its paradoxes. He shook his head with a smile, and said, “You don’t know the 1/2 of it.”
The performance in this video was recorded in January 2021 at the old Hood's Sarsaparilla Soda Factory in Lowell, MA.
The studio version of AustinTown first appeared as track #8 on Hola, Sayulita on 01 June 2010.
LYRICS when they dig us up – they might never know we dug deep – and left evidence as far down as they will go they might even think we were older than dinosaurs arrogance thinks we’ll see the end of the world that we’d be last ones – to ever see the truth/the truth it’s just funny how much truth you find ½ way between here & there so many secrets you can’t begin to dare to leave escaping only in dreams looks like it comes down tonight to AustinTown they’re gonna say we went backwards – all the way back before we went forwards again here it comes around again and there goes the truth/the truth it’s just funny how much truth you find ½ way between here & there so many secrets you can’t begin to dare to leave escaping only in dreams looks like it comes down tonight to AustinTown
