Forced off the road by the global pandemic, the Royal Potato Family artist looks for answers by putting pen to blank paper.

Gazing out of the rectangle windows from my perch in the back seat of a van, I have watched 100,000 miles of sprawling countryside soaked in violet sunsets pass by—barns and pastures and cows swapping places with strip malls and courthouse squares. When it was my turn to drive, I would lose myself staring out through cracked windshields at the long white line on the blacktop en route to every two-bit blues bar and broken-down honky-tonk from here to Shinola. Or sometimes, from the backseat of a cab rolling through downtown, I’d look up through the palm-printed glass at the screaming metal clifftops of Manhattan. My nose was pressed to the glass and outlined by my steaming breath as I jostled and bounced on a subway train, looking out and over to a graffitied Brooklyn to see about a love affair. I would find myself many times lost in a jet airliner peering at the cloudscape through the double-paned oval, pinging like a BB to places random and distant.

My favorite windows of all were the French shuttered monsters that stretched from the floor to the ceiling in my garden district flat down in New Orleans. They were magnificent. As I pulled them up to make an entrance onto the pitched balcony, I could feel the weights in the wall lower in counterbalance as the great contraption lifted with a soft, scraping rumble. All of these transparent apparatuses are portals to something outside of ourselves. Some are more or less cracked, dirty, stuck and operational than others.

Which brings me to the window I found myself staring through while at my desk in the spring of 2020. Something was different—very different. There wasn’t any motion, just my halted, altered reality and the relentless inertia that wouldn’t let me be. The world was—I was—suddenly, painfully still. A tiny, vicious virus had shut down the planet and put the kibosh on my touring schedule, which had been my life’s work. So I just sat in front of the panes as if they were some kind of an altar, praying for answers.

One answer came cloaked in the form of a book. So I wrote it. I chicken-scratched with a pencil in my green journal, I hunted and pecked on my computer. I recorded ideas on my phone and jotted down lines on a napkin while eating my cheerios. I mined my upbringing, my schooling, my rises, my falls, my travels, the wild array of outlandish near-death experiences and zany characters I have met along my winding way. It all came mercifully spilling out into the form of prose, poems and artwork. I lost and exhausted myself within its bindings.

Sometimes words came out as poetry, detailing shadows that stretched out like a yawn on my grass or a lone cardinal bobbing for a morsel in the dirt. Other times essays came out of a hot mess, hurtling me back to a story from my past that I had no choice but to write. I worked tirelessly, and I am proud of Your Van Is On Fire—the poems, the essays, the artwork all singing in harmony on those 6×9 cream-colored pages. The whole affair led me around by the nose, pointing me to something outside the ramparts of myself. It did the trick. Or so I thought.

I thought of the book as a book, but now that the book is a book, I realize I still have next to no bookings. Maybe not that much has changed? Am I still gazing out into a muted and muzzled world? When the apparent gloom still fills the room, what do you do? Remember that a window can serve as both a portal and a mirror. Birds freely fly into them mistaking the reflection for lush green forests.

On this rainy morning down in Georgia, where I write this essay, I can see myself reflected in another streaky pane, asking myself some of the same questions I asked a year ago.

Where do I go from here? What does this now bearded, burly guy look like in the wake of all that went dashing before? Is the image in the glass the same man who blindly followed his blissful blindness in the back of a van for over two decades? Is that the same chap who chased his tail, along with countless others, coast to coast without as much as a thought? Who is that man staring back at me with his dusty hat hung on the wall? How can he reinvent himself again as he did by cloaking himself as an author for a long summer?

Rainer Rilke once eloquently penned: “Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything—to live the questions. Perhaps you will then, gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

I can go along with that Meister Rilke—there aren’t any alternatives. Ah, the questions. They are moving targets with elusive solutions. They are portals and mirrors— great contraptions. Much like the rain-beaded window that stares out and back at me on this gray morning down in Savannah, where I make a brief stop on my way to more wondering and wandering—my reflection always in question.

**

Seth Walker released his first book, Your Van Is On Fire, in January. Described as “part memoir, part meditation and part art gallery,” the volume follows his 2020 Royal Potato Family album, We Got This.