In Nature, Animals are the Strangers

Tiger, tiger burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

—–Ah, William Blake–challenging nature, with these intrepid rhymes.  Are you sure, I ask, that animals are fully in harmony with nature, and not desperately lost in nature?  Is wildlife actually uncomfortable, and doomed–clumsy and unfit for any habitat on this planet? You think, now and then, that maybe animals are strangers, and people more acclimated to this mystery of life, this essentially incomplete setting? This mystery where all living things have landed without memory.
—–I saw a cat on the sidewalk, walking home tonight, who looked so desperate and captive. Huddled up, half in shadow by the steps of a dark house, and watching me walk past like with envy in its piercing eyes. It could only study a figure who to it must have seemed more at home in this place. And birds, they are prisoners of the air . . . they must look down and long to be able to finally land and go inside.  This is obvious; listening to them in the morning, I hear their distress calls to one another, their hopeless primitive melodies, which do not even produce the simplest music, but when isolated seem pure misery and maybe futile, coded messages, relaying their abandonment and their fear.  Maybe all animals are distressed, hungry and violent, wandering in unrecognized territory, just uselessly sustaining themselves, afraid of perishing, merely surviving, not in harmony with anything in the so-called world of nature. They seem to move like in a picture, posing, crisscrossing in two dimensional space, restricted to zones of limited perception, not seeing what we see. They are stranded, as if not easily adapted to color or sound, even of three dimensional space. I can’t get them  into perspective, because they are elusive, funny, not of this world . . .
—–I am trying to figure it out. Am I saying animals are for children’s books, that they are not representatives of nature? Did I say the setting is incomplete?  That the world is insufficient, that nature is nobody’s home? The setting only sketched in and partially made?  That the natural world is an alien environment, an imposition on both animals and humans? Or, that the planet is ours, and it wouldn’t do to view it as a product of animal evolution, because that is actually the way to lose it, even destroy it. If that is what I said!–I better elaborate further.
—–I am leaning toward the idea that maybe people are the creatures who are most at home–just because the world of nature is radically flawed, that it has no harmony really.  I am going to venture that we are utterly at home in this world, and, by contrast, animals are strangers. Animals are forlorn, but people are busy, and made to scale–but this is not to say that people are satisfied, no, they are well aware that this is not the place of their origin, or their final resting place, if rest there could ever be for the soul pitched in unsolvable mystery. No, to say that people are more at home in the world does not mean they are at home in their souls. They are tricked into adventures, convinced by their passions, in life which seems so natural to them, so familiar because people apparently belong in the world . . . at least for a time. Time! What is that to an animal, who knows only how to survive from one minute to the next? Time, producer of memory. Memory, what is that, to a cat!  Watch out before you broach this line of thinking at a dinner party, where people are eating. Better work this out further, or refine it or something, or make a childrens book out of it, before people start throwing food at me.

Enoch on the Wheel of Fire

—–I know I’ve said this before, but the main difficulty with believing that there can be any explanation for this life is the fact that it seems to have no prelude. One has to reckon with the potential oddity of an explanation that manages to account for this being the first of something, the premiere in a series. One has to wait for an explanation as to why they have no memory of anything else, and yet are forced, by the deprivation of meaning in current existence, to look forward to something else–something that explains or includes it, or at least follows from it. Often I walk down the street, there I am again walking down the street–and this hits me right as I am going past those three houses, in the stretch there where there is a gap, and the vault of the night sky opens up, between the trees. Why the thought always happens there, I don’t know; probably it is just right the distance from the house, the distance it takes to clear my mind, having left the house behind, as if I had gone out not just to be alone, but to find the time to think.
—–And I always arrive at this place in my thoughts, where I ask once again: how can this be the first existence I have had? Considering that it would require another one just to get an explanation, or to put this one in perspective. Do you see the grand humor in this equation, my companion thinker?
—–So maybe the perspective is not one of time, and maybe I am supplied with memories of other lives before this one. You can get as fancy, as profound and as idle, in your speculation as you want. And the fact remains, that anything previous, anything else at all!, has been blocked out, and that condition must suffice, during in this whole life. And that therefore if this life is to be remembered, it will be in a sequence that in some way puts the content of that memory (life!) before the explanation. Funny enough?
—–One cannot function, at least I can’t, without life being a bounded totality of experience and reflection on experience. Even imagination, if it does seem to summon another world, is really always made up out of parts of this one. Especially, I would say, imagination is comprised of narratives trying to animate and figure out fears and guilts, even that which you may say is primordial is still bounded, trying to figure them out in stories that primarily end up told as humorous tales, striving to be parables of life.  I strive always to incorporate anything strange or at incoherent into the ongoing explanation of life as a totality, a total mystery–in which I revel.
—–I have seen this and it is getting more conclusive, that life is voracious, and exclusionary. It excludes all other options. We don’t act as if death, which surrounds us, is even a factor! Nobody dies unto themselves, they only watch others get crushed and disappear, or sweetly say farewell like they were going on some vacation. And yet, and yet, life persists as a complete, a religious mystery. Life is sacred, sacrosanct, unbreakable. The ridiculous mystery of it enraps the thinker deeper and deeper, and the man of experience grows in this wisdom, and becomes weary with laughter.  He becomes rarified and he is exhalted–and he fears for the resolution of these very thoughts. Because he does not want yet to be caught up by the heels, like Enoch on the wheel of fire, and ride away on the wings of angels.

SUNLIGHT & CLAUSTROPHOBIA

Shovel

99) RETURN

—–There may be such a thing a thing as what actually happened, but it is quite obvious that the more information that is gathered from witnesses, or records that were kept of the proceedings, the harder it becomes to conclude what it was that actually happened. What happened in the past is better left to return its effect on its own accord, for no one seems capable of finding its strings and pulling it together. Of course people enjoy being drawn into the complexity, thrilling and detailed, the ambiguity of any investigation. Agencies are set up, businesses are formed on the simple assumption that the world is concrete and must have a history. And people display a terrible indignity if you point out to them that the obvious trajectory of their preliminary findings, are somehow leading to only more detail, more suspense . . .  They insist it is a truth commission, and do not bother to defend the assumed inviolate purity of their sources of information, as if these sources were scientifically established and already verified, proven reliable from experience! Such flimsy things as written reports and tape recordings!  Well what I said was–what I said was, one must wait for the past to return, in order to see what it was. And no amount of investigation into it, on the mere basis of an assumption that it had to be real, preceding and producing where we are now, which is like in a fog, or in a miasma, or in a bright day that seems the first of its kind–as if it, this past, still stood there solidly, and had not in fact been left behind and utterly dismantled, dissipated, and gone crashing to its grave. Why do we not ponder and appreciate what has happened to life, as we go through it? Why do we not weep? Why do we not celebrate in the spirit of building on top the ruins of truth not established?

98) Shell-shocked

—–The nature of experiences, bounded and yet arranged as if around a center of meaning, gives a person the idea that life in general, or life in total, is meaningful in that same, circular way. Because we are always figuring things out, we come to the idea that the mystery of existence is just one, or just the largest, of these puzzles, and that we can apply the same methods to it. But life is incomplete, and will not remit it’s secret.  The concept even, that there is one central secret, shows the habit, again and again. But no, life has no backdrop at all, no context. Is it this missing context, always pressing upon us,  which has forced upon us an essentially insane focus–this attitude of rationality, and these methods for organizing experience? Are we shell-shocked?

97) WINDOWPANES

96) Strength

This is my work station, where I transfer my handwritten notes to my computer, via an intermediary print-out, which I look over for a few days,  and subject to crazy emendations, and then, as a third draft revise right on the screen itself, and, after judging I have done all I can, send them onto the blog, I mean into the bloodstream. To suffer all the looks and revisions of an unwearying. bloodthirsty public, incalculable in size, clamoring and desperate in its intentions–which ultimately are focused on destroying me. I mean absorbing me, and all my discoveries. I know this is my fate, and I work steadily to achieve the utmost satisfaction for all those who feast off my words, and drain my strength. Or do I mean to say: All those who seek spirituality?  I don’t know, and don’t judge, because I am uniquely predisposed, qualified, crippled . . . can’t finish that sentence.

This is my work station, where I transfer night and day my thoughts to the page, etc.

95) RESILIENT

—–Out of nowhere, with some ferocity, a common cold comes on, to lay a person low and strip them of their defenses, to invade their body deep inside, and show the witless spectator who inhabits it that something invisible, suddenly inhaled, can take them down, land them in bed for days. Can cause a rethinking of priorities–for they have nothing else to do, but stare out from a delirium, eyes glazed, limbs aching, and crawl downstairs to the couch. I hardly ever get sick; but when I do, it is like carrying around a sad sack brother. We have quiet discussions, trying not to make each other worse, or threaten each other.
—–Always it is the same common wisdom, that occurs to the recipient of the common cold. That it is time, and it is in order, to retool. They are cautioned, in order to be remeasured; and resuited. It is a scourge, but in the sense of a cleansing. Yes, this realization must accompany the event of the body’s showing such vulnerability, its lapsing into unexplained weakness. And, if one can manage to assign to themselves some other undone task, which has been put on hold, waiting for good reason (one says) to be addressed, some lagging doubt, or chronic worry (ah, the vocabulary here is rich, the sagging fruit is on the trees and ready for plucking) then one finds themselves saying, here is actually opportunity! Show me my sickbed, and I will cure a bevy of parallel ills! I will show I am more than immortal on many a score. Yes! If you can rope in two or three other back burner issues, relating to neuroses that have been festering, hung around till they almost seemed like . . . realities!–well, one can simultaneously work on them, during the same time granted, or allotted, or generally recognized, for getting better from the primary head-cold that sent you reeling. One can piggyback problems here, and reemerge doubly strong. Not just repaired in body but also resolved on some other score, or several other scores–if one is cunning enough–which have been smartly associated like debts of a kind, or–I must mean–equal sins. Bundling everything into the recuperation.
—–One becomes opportunistic!  I want to get the structure straight here, before I apply facts or reveal any personal plot lines. Alot depends on what other people are allowing, in terms of the titular sickness, you see. I mean you have meet societal arrangements, and qualify in other people’s eyes. I mean I didn’t officially have this cold, I feel, until I called my mother on the phone, and she didn’t recognize my voice–it was so low, growling, and stuffed up. At that point exactly I submitted to her words; “My, you sound like you have a cold!”  And within ten seconds I began to envision the consequences. It was like an out of body experience, I saw myself hovering over myself while lying in bed. But in this first preview I immediately foresaw a few advantages. What I might be able to get away with, so to speak. Or how much I might accomplish in secondary areas, freed from work and, while shut off from others, close scrutiny. Banned from all but minimal exertion, served only by my wife–who is forgiving . . .
—–But, since, as I just said, I already am someone who never gets sick, I quickly realized I could only play it for the length of what is commonly experienced, as a common cold. Any further and your sympathizers become more trouble than they are worth. The story changes. In fact, fear of any alternate trajectory, seeing the encircling hands of dire fate encircle others I know, or have known even to their death!, is largely why I ride out the first symptoms of these common colds–without even mentioning them.
—–This time though I was ready to try being the victim, no doubt because I was backlogged with other complaints, confusions, minor ailments, ailments of a shadowy kind that reside in no location, neither physical nor mental, dubious but maybe profound signals of a spiritual transfiguration; ah, this I was wont to imagine, poetic troubles which needed addressing in the depths of prolonged sleep, half-sleep, propped up, book-reading idleness, forgetting body and mind. Certainly one can forget one has a mind.  And become so very relaxed.  And somewhere in here I have to consider this menu of symptoms, taking each alone, and dreaming them intermingling, and ask if they are not signs of increasing age. Always a factor to plague the man, who has taken marching orders, for illness and age are partners in delirium. Like Plato and Socrates, I want to say, within the same philosophizing man, two voices in a roundelay, forget which is the author and which the character speaking . . . in dialogues. Sickness is dialectical. Susceptible to dire analogy. Sounds like one needs an analgesic. Go on–
—–I am going to lighten this up in just a minute. Health and youth are facilely linked, and sickness and age made to pass a baton (marked with crossbones), for the sport of it.  I just wanted to say that. You don’t want to come out of the cold and find your the skin on the back of your hand and has visibly wrinkled. Or note a sagging pocket in your left eyelid, which is too roguish. I think it was when I was walking back last Wednesday night from Montys Krown, when I suddenly inhaled and gulped down a bucket of cold air, and instantly got a sore throat. It slowed my step, and made me cautious, half a block from home. I was thinking bitter thoughts about the people back there. They drag me down, I was judging–so I am going to have to ditch them. I just walked out of the scene, not even glancing back at their slobbish faces–which of course I visualized the whole next week, as I paid with redounding self-incrimination, laying in a stupor, for this general accusation. This you learn. No sense railing against other people. But this is just one debt I had to pay; by the end of my self-assigned sickness I was aware of how much misery I actually deserved, as I saw myself, as it were, paraded before every judge and jury. “Who are you, from other people’s point of view?” I got to ask. The watchers crowded into my living room,  like at a wake, as I lay trying to deaden myself further with the television. You want to be alone with your thoughts? This is is no way to do it.
—–Being sick was making me lose all perspective, it wasn’t clearing up a thing.  So, coincident with the miraculous effect this orange juice my wife kept bringing me, and these cough drops, marked Eucalyptus, were having, and the temperature outside rising . . . I reassembled myself. I even felt like writing again, for the sport of it!
—–One of my procedures is to go up to Monty’s Krown, around eleven p.m., and talk to all these friends I have up there. A variety of topics, from basketball to deep personal matters, from politics to poetry, which sometimes I referee and sometimes I create, give me material for this writing sport. So there I am again.  This fellow has me pegged, he is telling me he always wanted to read Moby Dick, but he just hadn’t done it, he felt guilty how he put this on the back burner, like his whole life. So I said the way to do this, to read Moby Dick, was to get a cold and then surreptitiously assign himself the task of reading it, Moby Dick, while recovering from the cold.  Because, I told him like confidentially, of course he is grandly free, in fact he is capable of profligate self-indulgence (pardon the big words), during that recuperation. And he said he knew this process, had milked colds before, even lengthened their duration when he saw what he was getting away with, with no one coming after him–he could just lie around all day.
—–Yeah, I said, add that to the fact that the you are getting stronger physically, for that is what the cold is for, actually, to lay you low and make you recycle basic strengths; so you are going to emerge physically stronger, your immune system newly filled up with your body’s own antibiotics, some of your bad habits somewhat cleaned up, as you learn you can be more austere, and if you read some book during this period, some great book that you had in mind, my God!  It is kind of a feint and follow up, a battle with your self in the gloomy mirror of some infirmary–weird, of your own making–I don’t how many things this resembles. It is kind of being able to take a punch, and you know what they say about everyone who is a winner, these days, it’s being resolute, or resilient. That is the word: resilient. People are hip, way more resilient than they publicly let on; they have all sorts of tactics for ducking any unsavory responsibilities of the moment, and making up for it with a sideways application, behind the back.  Pure cleverness at the last minute. I guess not giving themselves credit is one of the ways they maintain the very power. People are magicians, really. Humility, it works wonders.

94) Daytime

—–The things people say about those who have died, right in their midst–but long gone now, in most cases, these things I overhear or am even told directly, as I bow my head in fear and disbelief, about people who were once so alive, even more alive than we (I might say), well what these things make me realize is how little intended, desired, or expected is any future dealing, with that now smudged out former intimate. Lord have mercy, on smudged out former intimates! That’s a way to put it! Often, I just lose my grip on sentence structure, when faced with forbidden lines of thought; though I never lose the thought. It haunts me, and the terrain–their faces hang in the air–and eventually it becomes the theme of a bright, timeless day. Though I think in less dire philosophical categories than when I was a younger student of life (so to speak), I think about specific people rather more and more. And have my ears perked, quite apparently, for mention of those who have, um, died. What I am saying here is, the things people say about those who have died make you realize they have no intention of ever seeing them again. Dealing with them anymore.
—–Sounds brutal! How outrageous! Speak for yourself, I hear someone say, as if offended by the very notion that the oft-traveled highway between life and death could be . . . broken, littered with boulders, gone off a cliff into an abyss–or non-existent.. What are you saying?– goes a chorus of those who wish to remain, I imagine, innocent of judgements. Free of conclusions about anyone dead, though they may have damned them personally, back in the day. Breaking down the barricades, all souls running amuck between earth and some unfenced in hereafter, would the many shattered marriages find their participating egos in a different mood, or friendships won by dint of great worldly connection, find themselves quite flammable, in another context? A host of questions there? Another context did I say! Flimsily put, but that is the idea, for if the dead went anywhere they went into, like, another context. But, what is to discuss, when you already put a blindfold on the questioning clown and spun him around to disorient him, then broke a pinata over his head? That was fun, and that was life. And now I hear people saying things that clearly indicate they have said “good riddance”, and crossed Aunt Sally, and the once redoutable Fred, off their shopping lists. Said permanent farewell, to each of those who are lately skipped out, or early to seek God’s reward, or so rude as to bring in a kind of spiritual depression, or, more colloquially, to have taken their ball and stick and gone home. However it gets roundly put.
—–And putting this debate, this issue, on the shelf for a minute, one immediately sees there is a buffer zone, which is like the daytime itself.  A major conflict, before I can get to my quarrelling with the dead, and my admonishing of the living, is resolving why I insist that reality itself is base-line comprehensive. Where did I get this assurance that reality, no matter what, cannot break down, like within my witness, like right in front of me? It isn’t to prevent it from becoming weird–in fact weirdness just stands out in humming light of day. I have said this before. Unless of course someone has tripped on an invisible wire, and is careening . . . and we certainly have words to apply there.  But what I am saying is that I am continually reminded, from some quarter that life is not weird, but basic. It is like sanity, there is a certain sanity like when the wind dies down, and a slow rush of understanding blankets the mind, that doesn’t even want to be put into words. Or you say to yourself, “My! I am well rested, not a thing can touch me today.” You are balanced.
—–Oh, how nice would that be! I hear the tortured souls complain; but these are never the dead, these are only my complaining friends. “Ah! My friends,” I say, “originally I chose them”.  Personally, out of a motley generation, for my starting line-up. These friends who frequently, in fact whenever they get the chance, proclaim their worldly achievements, hopes, and worries, and in the next breath say something that lets me know how they feel about someone we jointly knew who has died. To whit, they are crossed off, because no one I have ever met is headed that way, really.
—–The ones who are there, I can never get them back, not even in the conversation. And not just because no one else wants to hear mention of them. I am also befuddled, choked up, and irresolute. And yet they circle around like hawks in my mind and keep trying various flight patterns, and land on lintels and across the courtyard–apparently seeking entry, but then they look the other way, like Poe’s forlorn bird in his historical poem, The Raven. Looking to explore another region entirely. By contrast, this sense that life occurs in an atmosphere of great normalcy, like at room temperature, this sense of the span of daylight hours increasing slightly every day now in late February, the crown or halo that is worn by everyone alive–how much is this actually pulling me away from even the psychological exploration of those people who have died. And we all know some of them, I said . . . in my lecture before the assembly of most reverential listeners; and also in kitchens, head bowed. When I spoke of this, then I made a great transition, to relieve the pressure, right before lunch. I asked, does this great normalcy touch down in history, hover and touch down, animating each period in history. Each generation?
—–Is this insulating daytime, this health and perspective, a shield against anything drastic, like precisely what befalls, has befallen, others when they die? Have died! Twisted and turned against the light; snuck quietly off into a corner and curled up. Hit by a meteor. And yet I remain unmoved. What! Something in me is unmoved by the death of family and friends. And this is not a difficult confession, but a kind of dry statement of fact. It doesn’t mean I can’t shake heaven and earth with all kinds of secondary considerations, or theorizing. Theorizing to no avail, there is nothing like it for the development of general intelligence. One makes headway in other areas, with analogies! That is true, so thinking is not useless . . . . What I just admit though is that that hammering, dull death knell, no matter how many it kills, doesn’t get louder, doesn’t touch base, in baseline reassuring comfort-zone reality. Now what is for lunch?
—–These themes have shadowed us from the beginning, and now they are nearly calcified, perhaps. Who can take the skin off the carcass? What a thing to say? Strike that last sentence, please! It’s like I think less and less, about about what is more and more apparent. Widening the absurdity gap, sure–but still it does not break the daylight. Ah, when I was younger I was more deeply troubled, and yet more carefree; and there again, a balance! The audience sees it, they do not squirm for these are easy truths. Perennial. The youthful thinker is devious, and yet lacking in what we might call . . . experience. And the dead, they are finished here, but have I decided which of them I will look up if I find myself in telephoning range (so to speak)?. Will I see any of them again, or is it only now I can see them, their hunched backs, their empty eyes? Strike that! These avenues of speculation go literally out of bounds, and it’s a baseline morality that soaks up all unresolved matters between the living and the dead, the dead who the longer they are dead seem never to have been here, really. Now wait just a minute with that assertion, quoth the raven.
—–New paragraph. I said one cannot proceed in life without in fact abandoning those who have died to such an obvious extent that it is futile to maintain them, to say you talk to them, consult them, follow their example, revere, emulate. Multiply it! The daylight is strong, the daytime is irrevocable, and when it is cloudy  the clouds seep into every corner. Reality is one hundred percent a closed system. It is a set of mirrors, in which the crystalline light can bounce, and travel. But not, this light, escape to unseeable borders. It always comes back. There is no one staring from behind the glass. This can only make you happy, and happier still.  File that in triplicate.