HERESAY NINETEEN
The snake
The thought of a snake intruded again. Usually the things I'll write about come through in words or phrases, often in complete sentences that I have to rush to get onto the shopping list. This was just a vague idea, but insistent, and the deal is . . .
So maybe something symbolic, a universal theme. Perhaps Evil in the garden of Eden. Our family is nominally Christian, but this never really figured. We lived in San Carlos, and a couple of blocks away there was a church. At five years old I wandered in, got in line, and received communion. When I got back home and told mom the wafer tasted good, she scolded me.
No, maybe more like the snakes Carl Jung discussed in his book, Man and His Symbols.. Until lately, this book has seemed opaque. Now it brings to mind that day, not long after my accidental communion, by the creek next to our house.
A blackberry creek with crickets sending chirps over dimpled red berries that were ripening to black. Sun and the breeze were bright together, every last thing sharp in detail. Calm, like the inside of a yawn.
Any description might seem farcical, doomed to laughter. Then why not recall Alice down the rabbit hole. Jack the Ripper fled from it. Ken Keyse sneezed and painted his truck. Suzuki Roshi said, “Hi!”
Overhead, in that ordinary clear sky, were watchers known but not seen, to which I could impute translucent orbs. Who were they? But impossible for any focus of attention while the regular life of the creek continued without change. Every ripple normal – except nothing since has ever been the same.
A flap jack breakfast at the Jubilee by the Sea was not the glory I'd expected. Things went backwards for awhile. Just regular things. Why should my left hand complain over its subservient role, grabbing attention? It began washing dishes, where previously it just held them as, per usual, the right hand washed. A revolution! And my amazement at finding the right hand trying to grab back its prerogative. Who started this?
I am not alone in having a bicameral brain. The two sides communicate through the corpus callosum. Beyond this physical description, and after a few years living with my activist left hand, a different relationship has developed. It's the same brain, but gradually I learn that all the parts comprise one fundamental nature. Everything is part of the same universe, and this realization informs the working differentiation of countless parts. The left hand is behaving in accord with this all-in-one realization.
We are getting along fine. How more delicate is the left hand sensibility. It is simply less raucous, needing less force than the workaday boss hand that has done the work of remodeling houses, carving wood, hauling wood, making stepping stone pathways, changing engine oil, and more aggressive things. The left hand, it might be said, is acknowledging “my” personal growth.
Sensing that it's time to write, Twinkie comes in to stretch out on her favorite blanket between my feet, as she does when I watch the news. The one horse carriage stops outside. Though no experience in this life can account for it, I am not surprised, right on down to the black buggy whip in its holder. And Twinkie, undisturbed as long as there are no sudden noises, falls fast asleep. I think we share a certain familiarity with mind weeds that spring up unexplained, like spider webs a bit hazy in the breeze. “In my youth,” the cab man says, “I favored whiskey. But as we eventually learn, time mellows with age.” The carriage slowly rolls into Twinkie's dream.
As I prepare for publication this morning, an article has appeared in The Conversation:
“FROM BATS TO SNAKES --
The researchers used an analysis of protein codes favored by the new coronavirus and compared it to protein codes from coronaviruses found in different animal hosts, like birds, snakes, marmots, hedge hogs, manis, bats and humans. Surprisingly, they found the protein codes in 2019-nCoV are most similar to those used in snakes.
Snakes often hunt for bats in the wild. Reports indicate that snakes were sold in the local sea food market in Wuhan, raising the possibility that the 2019-nCoV might have jumped from the host species – bats – to snakes and then to humans at the beginning of this coronavirus outbreak.”
