In The Kingdom #19 (Album Text)
Sonic Youth
EVOL (1986)

We move along so quickly on roads going nowhere. I ride
for hours under the spell of the asphalt. Days, and still
end up in the same spot. Inside the same mind.
Same life. Same dreams.
My body seems to move.
My eyes tell me that I move, have motion, and yet my
feet have not left their tracks. I am stable, motionless.
Unable to take another step. Highways are evil, God is
a man standing still, one who knows he is.
What kind of journeis do we expect?
Where can we travel? Some sit complacent,
some rush about to gasp at life.
Can we travel in our minds? With our bodies, in cars,
etc.? Cars blasting through space, unaware of the
natural world, destroying all in their path.
Animals birds cats racoons dogs people all fall before
THE CAR AND DRIVER. Sides of buildings..
The CAR AND DRIVER belong to a different species,
at odds with life. We must learn the secrets of
instantaneous transport.
Transportation systems are ludicrous.
There was a guy, a forever-boy man touched in the head,
who would go around picking up the carcasses of the
dead animals on the highway. So many, so many
unseen from car windows at 60 mph, and he'd take
them off and bury them. That much is clear. The first
time he found one still panting with the breath of life he
took it home with him and, not knowing what else to do,
cared for it. Put a splint on the leg, and bandages. After
awhile there were quite a few that he'd nursed back to
health. Sometimes they left back to the woods, but
mostly they hung around his...the place he lived. He still
went with touched slightly askew reverence to pick up
the dead ones, stiff and cold or red and sticky. It was his
mission. Somehow without words he knew this. Felt it.
Words lead one down certain regular, pre-defined pathways
but they can be constricting.
Words. Logic. Thought.
Reason. Without the words one may have to travel
slower, with a candle in the dark
instead of hi-beams on the interstate.
Where worlds collide...But you move into a different
place without words, a different vision.
He didn't know any of this,
he couldn't think of it,
yet he knew enough to perservere.
With certainty. Unquestioningly. Word-less-ly.
He picked up two one day both living and within half a
mile of each other. The distance between us...
black asphalt hiway recedes...converging at the infinite
horizon. One of them died on the way, in his hands. He
felt neither anger nor remorse, but merely buried it
as he did the others.