Poetry In Motion: Why Neil Young's LincVolt Matters - Page 6

We need people like Neil Young, and projects like LincVolt, things that are going to make people feel something, to push our environmental agenda forward. Things that are going to force people to think differently, things that are going to give people permission to abandon their safe haven of reason and rational thought and step into the unknown, to light a candle inside themselves and wander into the dark corners of their imaginations and their hearts. It’s time to do things differently.

As author Richard Holmes puts it in his elegant new book Age of Wonder, “The old rigid debates and boundaries – science versus religion, science versus the arts, science versus traditional ethics – are no longer enough. We should be impatient with them. We need a wider, more generous, more imaginative perspective. Above all, perhaps, we need the three things that a scientific culture can sustain: the sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but questing belief in a future for the globe.” [7]

To me, this is what LincVolt (and Neil Young) represent: Wonder. Hope. A questing belief in a future for the globe, and us all. It doesn’t matter if the car gets 100 miles to the gallon or 150, if the car is all electric or a hybrid, if it crosses the continent on that old Lincoln Highway or just drives Neil Young to his next gig. What matters is that the car IS. An old car that can do new things. Whatever the limits of its abilities and technology in the end, it remains a wonder. A spark.

Artists have the spark that lights the fire that lights the world. LincVolt is a spark. You know, Camus said that a man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened. Maybe LincVolt is one of those rediscoveries, for me. When I look at her beautiful, ridiculous, two and a half ton, 19½ foot long, heavy metal body, it tugs at my heart. When I look at her, I know that here, Neil Young’s imagination asked reason to dance. And when I look under the hood, it’s a comfort, somehow, such a comfort, to know that sometimes reason says yes.

References

1. A Guide to the Study of Literature: A Companion Text for Landmarks of Literature, Brooklyn College

Article Author: Karen Barry

Karen Barry writes to you from the middle of a laundry pile and a sink full of dirty dishes somewhere in Connecticut. Right now she is probably letting the dogs out. Or in. She loves writing more than housecleaning, and music more than anything. …

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