Barefoot in the sun, it's so pleasant this afternoon. With a broad rimmed gardening hat to block the glare it's me, recognizable now. They all flock around. Squirrel and the doves. Finches. I think Birdland neighbors must be out enjoying this too. Our TV weatherman put up his summary graphic for the next week: “NICE.” He ad libbed: “It's so nice to say nice.”
While I'm reading there's a scurry of flapping. Doves on the fence have been replaced by a peregrine falcon. It looms large and beautiful, with dark feathers sharply defined. Staring motionless, it finds me interesting and I know how the doves feel.
The bustle of Benton Street fades to an Orion sub hunter coming in for a landing, breaking with, “It's going to crash!” I head for the shoulder of Highway 101, by the golf course across from Moffett Field. And then, “Not this one,” to my great relief. But then a little later the shock upon entering Moore Systems' lobby – everyone looking out to the column of black smoke rising from the golf course. It fades back to the falcon on the fence, calling up a shiver – the two black propeller cones.
Straggling back from our drought/rain whiplash, surely today's weather is . . . no I'm not going to repeat his word.
A childhood memory lands next, the falcon effect trading reality for magic. I had gotten a plastic tooth brush case and built something like a tetrode inside. Not that I'd ever heard of one, but now it seems the idea almost fits. Bits of wire, screen, other mysterious things, and a cord with a power plug. The house did not burn down. Nothing happened. I never did believe in fairy tales anyway. And real world stuff only goes just so far.
My tetrode was unaffected by electromagnetic waves. The greater part of the universe, being dark matter, is also unaffected by them. Scientists are catching up now, admitting something out there, or in here, that escapes description.
Imagine a point of view, or nonview, that encompasses everything seen or not, measurable or not. Real estate towers, a plane crash about to happen, your previous life, nuclear weapons, a habitable planet, your next life. It is, of course, unimaginable. But that's no reason. It's unreasonable. That's the reason.
Reality is stuck, along with lots of other stories. There are limits to how many buses can fit on El Camino, where to house migrants that covet land “squandered” on single family homes. Limits to how many people the earth can feed. Numbers are magic. That's the yin and yuck of it. The brown falcon black hole of it.
In the summer here it's Big Bee, seeming accidentally to bump my cheek or imagination. An improbable translation followed by silence with no limit. Or Bee with no limit. Big Bee is black. Dark matter speaks like that. The silences shout until at last, after disremembering, they get the necessary attention.
A few steps away from this clipboard is the keyboard I play everyday. Where so called current events become something completely different. Riffs. Specks of fire opal, black dots on white dice, a dancing mouse with bigger fingers, spades, diamonds, Queens and a Jack playing lead tenor sax, forest sprites that run for their life from a planned redwood grove and the green ferns waving comfortably. Benton Street is laughter.
It's Rome all over again, barbarians storming Butcher's Corner. Maybe I'll email the Mayor. The reply might be a fire truck with a straight jacket, all this going on. It won’t solve the traffic or techie migration, tsunami of monied power. The entire universe is here without dimensions and it's sort of disappointing. At the Planning Commission there are yays and nays, conversations with neighbors. The line between interesting birds and conversations with them tends to insignificance. The words tend to fall into routine ways and rhythms. The pen shuffles in foolish rounds like a horse that instinctively knows a horse laugh but only whinnies for humans.
Withal and howbeit, the roar of everydayness loses accustomed meaning. What cannot be heard or seen becomes fuller than what is. Sein und Seit in ponderous mystery, once held in professorial esteem, become mosquitoes floating on a log in a stream. The instinctive avoidance of stepping on a pill bug becomes more than understandable. Not knowing is more than comfortable. And finally the absence of words is more than suitable.
