Road to West Berlin

Road to West Berlin, oil on panel, 18"x24", Steven Rhude, Argyle Fine Art

Part 1
To get there you follow the 103 southwest and then break off. You like Halifax but you want more. And it's not a highway that comes at you; rather it's a highway that goes to you, into you, and through you. Sharp bends and turns are much too loud to lull you into sleep like you may find in other parts, where the road is long and straight. Nope, no seduction... no mirage. Just coastal capillaries seemingly unconnected. Cherry Hill, East Port Medway, Port Medway, East Berlin, West Berlin, Eagle Head, Beach Meadows, and Brooklyn. Comforting names unless your thinking about Huey Pierce Long (the Kingfish)... and why Nova Scotia isn't all that much different.  


"Then I closed the door and went down the hall.
That had been the night of the fourth of April. I was almost sorry, the next day as I looked out the high window at the mass of people filling the streets and the wide sweep of lawn beyond the statues in front of the capitol, that I knew what I knew. If I hadn't known, I could have stood there in full excitement of the possibilities of the moment. But I knew how the play would come out. This was like a dress rehearsal after the show has closed down. I stood there and felt like God - Almighty brooding on history.


Which must be a dull business for God - Almighty, Who knows how it is going to come out. Who knew in fact, how it was going to come out even before He knew there was going to be any history. Which is complete nonsense, for that involves Time, and He is out of Time. For God is the fullness of Being and in Him the End is the Beginning. Which is what you can read in the little tracts written and handed out on the street corners by the fat, grubby, dandruff - sprinkled old man, with the metal - rimmed spectacles, who used to be the scholarly attorney and who married  the girl with the gold braids and the clear, famished - looking cheeks, up in Arkansas. But those tracts he wrote back then  were crazy, I thought back then.  I thought God cannot be fullness of being. For Life is Motion.


(I use the capital letters as the old man did in the tracts, I had sat across the table from him, with the foul unwashed dishes on one end of it and the papers and books piled on the other end, in the room across the railroad tracks, and he had talked and I had heard the capital letters in his voice. He had said "God is the Fullness of Being."  And I had said, "You've got the wrong end of the stick. For life is Motion. For --"  


Robert Penn Warren - All the King's Men


Well, we know as well that roads are also motion; harbingers of transit in a world arrested by images of stasis, images of assassination and the beatification of state. Driving  is as close as we can come to unconsciously moving from A to B without concerning ourselves with the return journey.


Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS.