LARRY AGAIN
Mr. Finch is at the bird bath, enjoying himself. He's kicking up a spray in the late afternoon sun, and I'm sure it's more than just getting the dust off. The droplets are a drift of pinpoint suns, and when he's done, it's not over. His bath, a round garden pot dish, remembers. Shimmers pile into each other. And the sun skimming over sends ghosts to dance magically on the fence.
The circle of images seems like a writhing logo. For what? Just above, on the fence rail, that young squirrel is back. And some company, also wispy tailed. It would be a bucolic scene, except there's a skirmish. I think maybe they're playing. But no, it's soon plain they're mating.
Sun flirting over the horizon, light dimming, it's over quickly.
So yesterday's squirrel is left sitting alone on the fence. Tail twitching. As though called in for a witness, our dove comes to roost on the TV cable. Squirrel jumps off, landing in the seed feeder, leaving a spot for dove on the rail. Well and good, until dove decides on getting some seeds. The skirmish this time is for real.
So nothing much happens here, right?
Squirrel wins, and dove filters down to glean scattered seeds off the ground. Thought happens.
They can't understand a working hypothesis, gleaned from the thoughts of others. It had been my hidden assumption, this best of all possible worlds. Surely there are potholes in history, and the weather varies, and there have also been some brilliant moments, and some we've been warned not to forget lest they recur. That it will all continue, though, was taken for granted.
But it's coming down to, how long?
We seem to have found a nexus, fellow humans, in the eye of a squirrel. Not to exclude birds, horses, bandicoots, the list of creatures with eyes is long, impressive, and shows how widely shared this sense is. It defines, literally, how we think, and is more exact than the other senses. The smell of compost or a polluted river cannot be pinpointed with visual precision, being liable to confusion in windy situations. Thought is more easily managed in ways learned through visual differentiation. Things begin here and end there, they are black or white. We praise sharp thinking.
As humans we've traced evolution, advancing reasons to infer a past with a beginning, which implies an end, and thus we posit the bookends of thought, seeming logically real. But for all that finality we nonetheless intuit infinity, a supposition that characterizes some idea of the universe, where both finality and infinity escape visual definitions, and the unthinkable is thus allowed to proceed as though on equal terms with terms sharply defined. We are at loggerheads. What we can measure and what we know are not necessarily the same.
The cameo ~ this best of all possible worlds, which always was and will be ~ is too perfect. But it's widely believed. Our world, in fact, is disintegrating.
The results of climate change are now moving fast enough to involve the next generation. Already there is talk, outside corporate media, about the known causes of fossil fueled energy production, and more generally the impetus of capitalism, of which the familiar affirmations are growing muted. We have results similar, if not identical, to the demise of a Ponzi scheme.
The leap from bird bath to capitalism will easily weather objections when I reply that birds are not socialists, or anything with an ism. And it's equally clear, I rebut, that birds and other creatures have only humans as agents of climate change.
Frankie is back outside again, here on the very chair from which he launched his attack on the Alaskan husky invader. It's a pleasant day, and I've just watered the lawn. It keeps the dust down. He's sticking close by, checks the side yard path. Invader? Susan slides the door open, but he doesn't want to go back in. Over my knees I've put the blanket he likes, but he won't sit on my lap. Instead he climbs onto the back porch step, which is raised, giving him a view of the entire back yard.
The cameo hangs beautifully, swaying in the breeze. It suddenly occurs to me that a logo and a cameo have similar functions. Here they both are portraits of time, which as usually conceived is a one-way street. I recall Dogen Zenji: Being-time is forty elbows. I think of a mandala, painted in grains of brightly colored sand, brilliant particles, which remind me of some interpretations of phenomena studied in quantum physics, and physicists who cannot reconcile other interpretations of the same phenomena showing they are waves.. And right here, seen anyway without all that protocol, in the macroscopic world, a ghostly circle right here on the backyard fence. And the grand finale? There is none.
The best thing is just sitting in the backyard. Wild friends come to visit. We just do nothing, They don't require entertainments, though Twinkie sometimes brings out her toy ~ a crumpled piece of tin foil on a string. And I make it dance. She chases leaves. Who could be bored with a breeze?
Now she's snuggled up against my foot. She's washing a paw. Twinkie knows when nothing is happening.
