Listening to the song while driving a slow road that ran beside a railroad track I had a vision of the streets of Detroit filled with people dancing, a Motown carnival celebrating life before death, like the carnival of Mardi Gras celebrating life before the death of Lent, the season of ashes. But we are dancing on the ashes of a city that fueled the smoldering groin of America with song and with cars. We shine, our sweat pouring from defiant flesh:, ash and sweat mingling, making the barren, rich: flush with life.
It is this dream of resurrection that the song sings in me and I believe it had to have been written there, in Detroit. And though I know there are facts which contradict this, that prove it wrong, I choose to believe in a truth without basis in fact.
I used to know two bright and beautiful women from Detroit who told me that they used to like to get high and drive in rush hour traffic there. I never knew quite how to catalog this information. I could not understand the motivation. I have been in rush hour traffic in New York and New Jersey and have found no joy in it and certainly no reason to intensify the experience chemically. These women seemed otherwise quite sane, so I couldn't dismiss this report as lunacy but rather sought to find some key to understanding or at least appreciation.
We carry mysteries with us all our lives, questions raised but not resolved. They linger sometimes for many years before something occurs to make them make sense. This was a forty year mystery made sensible, if not entirely comprehensible, by a song.
Detroit's vitality, its being, is a throbbing engine, it's wheels on macadam. Cars are the blood that courses through its veins, they are life. To be a part of a car and that car a part of the rush of life is to become one with the soul of the city, an experience I never had but think it might be akin to walking the rush hour streets of Manhattan. This I have known and I have lost myself in the flow of humanity that pulses with the energy breathing from the stone and steel of the millions of souls whose bodies built this great gray machine, becoming the thing itself.
This is where the Locomotion brought me, to Detroit., in a crowd, dancing.
It is this dream of resurrection that the song sings in me and I believe it had to have been written there, in Detroit. And though I know there are facts which contradict this, that prove it wrong, I choose to believe in a truth without basis in fact.
I used to know two bright and beautiful women from Detroit who told me that they used to like to get high and drive in rush hour traffic there. I never knew quite how to catalog this information. I could not understand the motivation. I have been in rush hour traffic in New York and New Jersey and have found no joy in it and certainly no reason to intensify the experience chemically. These women seemed otherwise quite sane, so I couldn't dismiss this report as lunacy but rather sought to find some key to understanding or at least appreciation.
We carry mysteries with us all our lives, questions raised but not resolved. They linger sometimes for many years before something occurs to make them make sense. This was a forty year mystery made sensible, if not entirely comprehensible, by a song.
Detroit's vitality, its being, is a throbbing engine, it's wheels on macadam. Cars are the blood that courses through its veins, they are life. To be a part of a car and that car a part of the rush of life is to become one with the soul of the city, an experience I never had but think it might be akin to walking the rush hour streets of Manhattan. This I have known and I have lost myself in the flow of humanity that pulses with the energy breathing from the stone and steel of the millions of souls whose bodies built this great gray machine, becoming the thing itself.
This is where the Locomotion brought me, to Detroit., in a crowd, dancing.
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