Thursday 24 October, somewhere over America.

Thursday 24 October 2012, somewhere over America.

"It's time to walk away and start over again" sings Tom Waits.

Heading for home, finally. The last few weeks have been exhausting, packed with event, image and experiences both good, better and only occasionally less than perfect. The gifts of the attendant genius of a nation scattered like diamonds in the snow, hidden in the grey and humid Halloween mists of a New York Indian summer.

Vermont is deep in the past already, a workshop that was exhausting, enlivening and memorable. I haven't felt like this in years, the old thrill of changing tack on the fly, re-writing and inventing new material between sentences. And what did we learn? That I'm too old for this particular game. My time is better spent on content not process. Just because you can still do it doesn't mean it's yours to do. It's not as if there's not enough writing for me to do.

TheTempest was a revelation. I'd been waiting for LeMoyne Theatre's studentproduction for a year, since the mention of it last September gave me goose flesh. We saw a rehearsal, the full play with all its secrets and hidden magics uncovered. Reduced to ninety minutes but with all the pieces I needed handed to me like a string of rosary beads unloosed. The Aristeas tale fits better than a glove, as we discovered talking to the director, a brilliant, gentle man quietly crafting and polishing the facets of his gems. He does more than he knows, as he well knows. Magic is as magic does. 

Outside, from Vermont to Maryland, the Autumn leaves still drop like tiny glowing flames with a softness of sound unlike anything but it's own measured whisper and plash. Like a paper waterfall, pouring relentlessly, one drop at a a time. After five weeks their relentless beauty, from the iridescence of the Adirondacks to the distant purple of Long Mountain, is overwhelming.

The sweaty hustle and charge of New York City seems like another lifetime, another world, another yellow moon over the Hudson with the Jersey Shore hidden in the haze, and the Gate to the Underworld hidden in plain sight in Georgia O'Keeffe's masterpiece. The Black Iris sits silent amongst the paint and adulation of the Met, the clatter of tourists and the silence of painters long dead, dark beyond the night and deeper still. If ever you needed a place to shout a secret into the earth-mother, never to be known or discovered, here she is, the Black Madonna with her skirts lifted to hide the clatter and roll of any fugitive soldier. 

Oskar Matzerath, the little Tin Drummer of Prussia becomes confused in my head with all the drummer boys of the Civil War, dressed alike in blue and gray and fear. Their awed faces stare out of tintypes and daguerreotypes with the same shocked, blank, drained expression. All of their understandings have been blown to pieces, left torn and maimed in the fields and streams, draped like rags along the crooked fences.

It's only been a week since we walked Antietam battlefield, walking the field on a clear and windy afternoon, autumnal, bucolic and subtly deceptive. There's new corn growing in the Cornfield, and there's two Wisconsin girls at the fatal corner where the Iron Brigade broke through that morning, losing 5,000 men to the guns of Colonel Thomas Lee.

They're sentinels, perfectly uniformed and armed, two Wisconsin Black Hats, pickets of the Iron Brigade still keeping vigil, doing time for their long-lost great-great-great grandfathers: two survivors of a bloody morning in a September long ago, who came home whole but broken in spirit. The girls are respectful and fit the small-framed uniforms perfectly, but they're embarrassed by what their forebears became, an opium addict, a ne'er do-well, a drifter.

The ghosts are piled thick, one upon another in Bloody Lane. There are patches, 'neath a tree at the corner, under a green ridge along the front rampart a little further on, where you can feel the men who died here. Not in general but personally, each one a soul snuffed out too soon, too often fighting for a folly not of their own making. It's cold here, even in the sunshine. The voices will speak, if you listen. But I'm done with that, for the most part. I leave them to whisper to others, to each other of their grief and surprise, and disappointment.

Tommy Meagher was sentenced to penal servitude in Tasmania at 21 for his Fenian ways, and escaped to freedom in America at 26. Now a Brigadier, he led the New York Irish in their charge across the rising ground from Antietam creek. His men suffered greatly, cut down by the hundred by the volleys of the Virginia Volunteers. Their sunken cart-track was a perfect gun trench, until at last  the Irish crossed the ridge and got amongst them. Then it became a trap, with no way out, back or forwards. They died together by the thousand. 

At Burnside's bridge the wind was cold and picking up while we were flagging with the day. As we stood, too tired to go down, a shape-shifting re-enactor broke out of the smoke down on the bridge and charged the bluff, with grit and sand, and heroic folly. He held the colours high, picked out by the slanting sun as he became a silhouette, defying the years and the fire of the 500 on the bluff.

We became connected to spirits of place long gone, but ever present in a landscape still in shock, still filled with awe. Sacred ground, yet unholy. For why should 23,000 men die for others to cross a field, take a ditch and cross a bridge? To pay for ground stolen from others? Is this how America grows? And all to be reduced to a liars competition to rule it all 150 years later. The death-instinct is deep in people, and here they carry guns, and still dream the old, false dreams of glory amid the tears.

The election campaign rolled on like a deadly, mind-numbing juggernaut. A behemoth of words, of lies with a half-life of just hours. We saw Bill Clinton speak in a humid hangar at a rainy Syracuse Airport. He still has the same incredible empathic connection, the charismatic appeal and warmth that reaches you behind your cynicism. But he's aging, and the miles are beginning to tell. He reminded me of seeing Gough Whitlam speak in Brisbane in the early 90's. Still the towering intellect, the Olympian manner and the weight of moral power, yet diminished, more by the age of his audience than the aging of his message. Their lack is what's missing from the exchange, not his. They know not what they do not do. 

 With Clinton it was a brisk run through a speech he's been giving three times a day in three different states for weeks now, flogging the horse beyond hope in the clear knowledge of what this is costing him personally. No matter what the outcome, this is shortening his life, and he knows it. But the stakes are too high so not to do. The appalling nature of Romney is his naked ambition, spilling out in the 'gaffes' when his idiot greed for position and power brushes aside his paper-thin charm and appeal. There's no cracking of the mask, because he has no mask. This vacuum is really who he is, sans truth, sans heart, sans concern and compassion and utterly sans content. Whatever he once believed it's long since been traded away. This truly is form without function, just ugly, sincere, unctuous absence.

What's been truly shocking is how much more attention we pay to their politics than do most of the Americans we've met. That and the sheer brass neck of shameless, guileless lying, day after day, debate after debacle. That it's discussed and dissected every day by what passes for journalism without someone screaming that this is ugly, twisted and vile, an enormity beyond the form and shape of real politics is what's most staggering. How did we come to the point that a blatant lie, repeated and embellished upon daily, gleaming like a gilded turd, can be accepted as legitimate political discourse?

My senses, and sensibilities, became numb by the time we reached Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's slave-run pleasure dome and personal Xanadu. Perhaps it was the wearing mileage, the hundreds of miles we had covered that made it so, but the Crossroads Inn, a tiny Bed and Breakfast in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania meant more, was more, lived more of the eighteenth century than Jefferson's mountain-top fantasy of enlightened living.

The couple who ran the place (Colonial Crossroads B&B) have spent seven years creating a 'true down to the handmade nails' living example of boots and britches life in the 1790s. After a gloriously comfortable four-poster night we shared breakfast with the inn's guests at a narrow form table before the hearth, politely discovering the US Navy lad and his spouse, en route to New Orleans from Fort Benning. He in a grey t-shirt with NAVY proudly proclaimed in blue upon it. She in a pink-spangled 'Anchors Aweigh' top that stated her love, fidelity and fey proprietorship. At the other end a New Jersey couple, he older by a decade, were friendly and provincial.

The pewter tableware, polite conversation, good manners and low ceilings reminded me of old wooden ships and the breeches I wore at school at other long tables, and I became an aged and compatible Steven Maturin with no effort whatsoever. 

 By comparison Monticello was a museum of quaint and obvious hypocrisy. The guide's genteel southern charm assured us that, while DNA had proved disturbingly conclusive, Jefferson's long term love-affair with his slave Sally Hemmings detracted not one whit from his stellar accomplishments, his place in noble history, his 'let freedom ring' words and hot air.

He freed only five of his two hundred slaves in his will. Which means some of his own children remained slaves. The estate was bankrupt, and this, apparently, was a perfectly acceptable reason in these United Sates to deprive human beings of their right to the pursuit of whatever happiness a slave can dream of. We came away enlightened, perhaps, but only more aware that the weight of the architecture, with all it's quirks and charms, was raised only on the slave quarters, the kitchens and the locked and bolted smokehouse and ale house.

It's music. That's the big thing I'm bringing home with me, the weight of our baggage notwithstanding. The older I get, the more it means, every kind, every style, every chord and confection; the more it affects, the more it touches me in ways that were once only the province of love, and sex, and imminent death. The rock and roll that lit up my late teens is still with me. My tastes have matured but not changed. But each flourish, each little touch of artistry, each riff, glissando or sprinkle of echo, of style and substance mix't lifts my spirit more than I can explain or reason why.

There is a power in this that I understand intellectually, but nonetheless cheers and heartens me with such power and joy that I am constantly surprised. It makes the prospect of age less disconcerting. If music gives me this there is little I cannot face.

And at home there are guitars, in ranks and battalions, to be enjoyed. Soon, soooon!

PS: Somewhere over the Pacific .. Bruce Springsteen has the best political statement of the entire US election campaign - We Take Care Of Our Own, first track on the new album Wrecking Ball.

 PPS: for those who may have been wondering how long it would take 'our' magpies to realise we were home and turn up for a feed, the answer is twenty minutes, and in the dark.