HERESY
A good story is what people really want, with a beginning, complications, an end. Jack and Jill went up the hill only to find, after a desperate search, that it had disappeared!
What a fog.
No one knows how software so carefully written could have gotten to bungled. Isn't there a reset procedure? But reboot without honor would be like fining BP a paltry million for the gulf disaster. It might have been utopia.
Or dysutopia, no use pretending to have known the facts. Tempting. But no hacksaw in that cake.
So finally here, right here in this backyard, these questions have taken on a life of their own, sprouting wings, following a flock of passing birds. Strange birds that nest elsewhere. Chasing after a can of worms, free at last, squirming down that tunnel towards the end of light – go gently worms. A futile plan for world peace in retirement.
Strange worms that catch the early bird – this backyard is not apart from the universe, and there is no choice but this is my allegiance. And questions that have flown to where? A pastiche of observations, my quilt of ruminations. But lately there is climate change, as The Creek Talker has reminded us.
Today the effects are locally pleasant and easy to ignore, as most everyone seems to. The air is moist, recalling summertime at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. The sky is stretched with high thin clouds – NWS forecast calling for record breaking heat today, inland, monsoonal moisture to arrive tomorrow: “A gentle breeze will help maintain comfortable temperatures along the coast and in the San Francisco bay area.”
The barracks were thick concrete, which helped muffle the sound of my portable typewriter downstairs in the day room at night. Even then there was some mysterious need to write, even though I had no clue as to what. It returned some fifteen years later during hippie days and a headlong escape from the war machine. Kay Gretchen ran the reproduction room during my stint as a technical writer then, was an astrologer who did my horoscope, noting that as a Gemini the stars had cast me as a communicator, a writer. Which was interesting but not any real explanation. More to the point was Charles Fort who said: “We are lived.”
Perhaps this is becoming a story? But the idea of there being a reason for it seems absurd. Take this sentence, for instance: the First letter is capitalized, a venerable tradition, and it ends with a period. There's the whole story! See how it gets up a deal of momentum all on its own . . .
The next door front lawn has an oleander tree! the result of a convenience for their gardener who, understandably, would rather not bother with a shrub when mowing. The birds living in it don't know any better. They resemble robins, maybe they're not, which matters to me about as much as the formal nature of their relationship. We're all friends. They travel about pretty much as a couple and easy to spot here in the backyard as one of them has a white mark on one side of its beak. White beak looks me in the eye and I reply with whatsoever is on my mind at the time.
It's a very definite place here, but changes with perspective. Zoom out and it's a speck. Zoom in to see it dissolve into quarks and a defiance of presumed reality. There is a beeperless message: You're being watched! Looking up and over to the fence rail I spy white beak--- Gotcha! Somewhere a supernova has blinked.
Our summer song, sun slanting, lifts a multitude of tiny flies in a cloud of glitter, in media res, and I disappear, imagining for the moment an out of body experience that did actually happen once. But it will have to wait. For now it simply illustrates there actually is an “I”, however spiritually indelicate. The cutesy quotes were wings, just here temporarily, that flew off with that flock of birds, the futile guise of an imposter, a fat lipped guru who wanted to pretend. Well of course I exist though the image is a glittering cloud of flies, devolving into quantum considerations in the afternoon light.
Oh there it goes again. Are we on the same page here? Historically it's such a solid thing, flexible enough to turn. Or it's an ecological crime that destroys trees for the sake of what – these deathless speculations? This might have arrived on a tsunami of electrons. It doesn't matter, portable typewriter or telepathy – the thought's the thing.
Sometimes thought outdoes itself.
On a lazy afternoon in the mountains of Montezuma, the air still as sunlight, came a vagrant thought, indeed, a plane passing overhead. Such a rare event then and there. Why not follow it? Let the mind trace its journey.
As the sound receded infinity was born. Not the idea of it, or the thought, but the actuality. And the mind, once in pursuit, will not give up. There it was, or wasn't – quite as still as the sunlight which hadn't heard exactly where the sound went silent. A world stopper. Just like the big gong at Kannon Do Zendo, in Mountain View, that I loved to play.
These pursuits lay unconnected in memory, so enjoyable yet held in the grid of time by a space of about sixty years. Now the grid has disappeared, the joy is like two friends returning from separate vacations – here in the backyard where two doves have arrived. They've been watching from the cable TV line, and now both are in the feeder. The compost bird, twitter bits, all feed one at a time. Doves do things in pairs: sitting on a fence, or in a tree, watching me mow. It's that kind of joy.
As I avoid stepping on a fly, perhaps one of its past lives forwards the question: “Dare I live the life I have?” There is no tying down the origin of these things.
I amuse myself with an imagined theory of synapses and psychological catacombs, inherited at birth. And pundits of the earth allow just enough disagreement that a theory does exist. Except my theory is heretical.
