Finding Seth Haines
The Ozark mystic, the hole in the ground, and a box of powdered donuts.
I’ve been gone a while—a natural byproduct of vocational calling. And by that, I do not mean some spiritually self-important way of saying God called me to the Congo. I mean, my actual vocation—attorney at law—called and called and called and asked for my attention. So, I put some things down for a season and picked up the weight.
As to weight, my only outlet during this vocational living season has been the gym. It’s a place of steel and sweat, and as my friend John Blase says, “The iron won’t lie.”1 That’s the truest poem I’ve read in a month, and it came in the form of a text message. Poems are everywhere.
Here’s another thing that won’t lie: Ozark mystics. The present mystic—the one who sat across the cafe table—had one of those gray beards that hung down to his sternum, the kind that catches bits of burger and spaghetti when he eats. Save a little for the birds, he said as a piece of bun fell to the nest of hair below his chin. He sat upright, shoulders back, and his forearms could only be described as cartoonish. He’d never seen a gym in his life, he said, because If steel don’t lie, neither do the stones. He knew the weight of stones. He’d been moving them from the bottoms his whole life.
Between bites, I told him I’d lost something in these weeks of work. I wasn’t sure what, but it felt—what’s the word?—fundamental. It wasn’t a creative block. It wasn’t a way with words, either. After all, I’d written over 6,000 words in legal jargon over the last two weeks. It was something else, and I could only describe it this way: An inability to care about the many things writers are supposed to care about these days. All those tiny tempests made by the Modern Tempest Trust.
He once knew a member of the Modern Tempest Trust, he said, a pretty high-ranking one. Maybe a Regional Director? He postulated this while a drip of mustard streaked his beard. He said the man was a pot stirrer, paid by the MTT to get everyone worked up. You know… on one side or the other, he said.
I asked what happened to him.
Uploaded his consciousness into a cyborg or either got a whale-load of plastic surgery and made his way to Congress, he said. He believes himself a true American hero, the kind who makes the world worse by 1% a year.
Across the room, a dumb parakeet sat on his caged perch and stared at the bit of bun in the old man’s beard.
There’s a stone, he said, down near the bluff, just under the falls. He pulled a napkin from the holder, dipped a french fry in catchup, and drew a rough map. X marked the spot.
You’ll know it when you see it, he said. It takes the shape of a skull.
Two hours later, I found that stone under the overhang of a cliff wall, the place where the falls should have been were it not for the drought that’s covered this region like a weighted blanket. There: a small slab of ordinary-looking sandstone, except it was in the shape of a memento mori—remember mortality. Its measurements: two and a half feet long, two feet wide at its widest point, four inches thick. It was almost an ordinary rock, uninteresting except for its shape, which was accentuated by faint fossil outlines where the eyes and nose should be. I stooped over those fossils, examined the outlines of what? Ancient life? Leaves? Shark teeth? No. The indentations took the shapes of letters. Those letters were an instruction: L-I-F-T.
Here’s how to lift a 250-pound stone: squat; straighten the back; grip the underside; pull. When you have the upper portion of the rock against your knee, take a step back and roll the stone over.
It was no easy task—some real Scandinavian strongman shit—but the rock gave way and a rush of air blew dried mud and dust toward the ceiling of that overhang. There was both scent and sound in that rush of air—the musk of detritus on a Louisiana bayou bank; the sweet smell of cinnamon rolls; the faint echo of A.A. Bondy’s “A Slow Parade.” I stood over the place where the rock had once been and stared down into the perfect blackness. I shined my light into the hole, but there was no bottom. No sides either, at least as far as I could tell. This was no hidden cave entrance. It was more magical.
And I’m going down where the waves will surround.
To the roar and the pound of the wild, wild sea.
Talking sweet to me.
Lyrics or instruction? I couldn’t say. So I did the only rational thing. I stepped into that hole.
There is nothing like falling into the shape of a life, which is the only way I can describe what happened next. In that hole, the dark blackness pressed me into the shape of memories.
I was in the happiest place on earth. Eight years old again, standing on the summer banks of the bayou with my uncle, lighting M60s and tossing them into black water. The crack of the fireworks and the smell of sulfur. Green duckweed exploding into the air.
I was still eight, riding shotgun in my grandfather’s green GMC to the donut shop a few miles down the road. In the store, he slides a five-spot across the counter for an entire box of donuts—cinnamon rolls, jelly-filled, powdered. The man behind the register gives me an extra bag of donut holes for the ride home. In case you get hungry, he says.
There, the music. My mother sings R-E-S-P-E-C-T at the dinner table because she’s always loved Aretha and because I refuse to eat boiled sprouts. My dad introduces me to Crosby, Stills, and Nash, tells me that, No, Marrakesh Express is definitely not about drugs. (This white lie unfolds over the following years.) Next, the pew at Immaculate Conception where I listen to John Michael Talbot play his classical guitar in his monk’s garb. Then the concerts: James Taylor, the Indigo Girls, K.I.S.S. (had that really happened?), Big Thief.
There, the girl in the red cafe booth in Searchy. Sweet Moses, those clavicles. She laughs at a dumb joke. She knows I’ll ask her to marry me in a matter of weeks. For now, though, we concern ourselves with pancakes and bacon.
There, the poetry. Stafford, Berry, Cummings—I thank you God for most this beautiful day. The last poem seats me in a small cafe in Fayetteville, where the Dean of the law school recites it from memory over the small staff of the Arkansas Law Review. He recites it for what? Surely not for us, the legal scholars who are more concerned with evidence than poetry. But poetry is its own sort of evidence, and all the evidence points to the fact that he’s reciting this poem for my young wife who is finishing her first year of an MFA in poetry. He wants her to feel seen. This, he tells me later, is what we call ‘hospitality.’
I see things in that hole. The births of four boys, each lying under a warming light as the doctors take vitals. Isaac, two years later wearing my wading boots. Jude in his Spiderman Halloween costume, the one he wears around the clock. Ian lowering his voice so he sounds more like what he believes men are supposed to sound like. Titus running through a near-death experience and and brick walls.
I am pressed and pressed and pressed, and I sense something in the darkness. There is so much above ground—so much under the sun—that means so little. Among those things: the Modern Tempest Trust; the mad men and women in Washington who play power for sport; the influence of an algorithm; the faces, bodies, voices of the people who both wield and use those algorithms; the cyborgs, A.I., and Neural Link implants; the spin cycle of opinion in the Times, X, the Christian rag, Substack, wherever; makeshift definitions of freedom; makeshift definitions of bondage; makeshift definitions of righteousness, evil, or even grace; fear-mongering; fear baiting; fear grifting. Everything threatens to boil all the humanity out of us. All of it is the death of donuts, music, poetry, family, love.
Above ground, the gears of the grift churn along. Our bones and blood grease those gears.
Wake—a voice says somewhere overhead. Rise. Take. Eat. Remember.
When I do, I find myself on the floor under the falls. There I see a white box, a vinyl record, and a photo of first love. I eat the donuts and bend my ear to the tune of Sweet Judy Blue Eyes.
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The Observationalist
In the spring of 2023, I began exploring the concept of visual language by creating a book of photos, poems, and short essays entitled The Observationalist. All proceeds are reinvested in the equipment I need to pursue more ideas like this. You can preview The Observationalist by following this link.
Thanks for reading!
According to Blase himself, this is an adaption of a quote from Henry Rollins. You can find Rollins’ article here: https://www.oldtimestrongman.com/articles/the-iron-by-henry-rollins/
One of my favorite things you’ve written.
Good lord. I'm kind of speechless. Other than this: thank you.