Skitter-skatter Sunday with a thin fog embellishing the soft call of the mourning dove. The street outside the house is largely empty of the cars that seem to have taken neighbors here and there on the long Memorial Day weekend... leaving behind an empty barroom that once pulsed with dance and decorations. My mind murmurs with the mourning dove....
-- I wonder if it is an accurate sense of the country in which I live ... a sense that seems to boils down to a damp and lumpy mattress in a flop house... a place where, only in sleep, is there much honest delight and vision and laughter. I wonder whether, when at last the country is colonized (perhaps by the Chinese), this flop house will be demolished and the mattress tossed out as the colonizers impose a vision that my country could not find or apply ... some vision, any vision other than a flop house with its damp and lumpy mattresses. Their own upright vision of McDonald's, perhaps -- these colonists are so easily satisfied ... knowing "the cost of everything and the value of nothing."
-- Music is so magical. You can love it or hate it. You can be lifted by it or cast down. Music does not complain or agree. But perhaps there is one thing no one can do with music and that is to contradict it. This morning, for example, an old 1960's song climbed up out of a distant memory bank and loop-taped in my mind. Over and over again like some nagging child -- lookit me! lookit me! And so, like any adult with a child, I surrender in the end and do lookit-me ... what other choice is there? There is no other way to shut it up or contradict it.
-- Elsewhere, someone was flogging his new book about "nothingness." It was obviously something the author took seriously and yet, I couldn't help but wonder about the things anyone takes seriously: If you take it seriously, isn't that enough? Doesn't everyone have a thing or two about which s/he is serious and as a result dives deep into the rabbit hole of seriousness and intricacy and importance. And yet, in the end, is simply dying for company ... someone with whom to 'share' perhaps ... or someone on whom to spread the bliss and balm of one particular seriousness or another? There may be claims of not selling ice to Eskimos, of simply laying out the importance of a particular importance, but it is clear from the exposition that the last lesson of importance has not yet settled -- a nice big helping of "shut the fuck up." There is nothing saying I can't say what I want when I want -- that I can't lay out my leanings and persuasions -- but implicit or explicit bids for agreement ... well, if a thing is true and you know it's true, by what reasoning does that truth need to litter someone else's lawn?
I know it's a delicate matter, but still ...
I imagine a lizard takes seriously their next meal, safety, and the occasional opportunity to breed. I can wonder if they ponder other things like nothingness or spirituality or politics, but doubt it while unconvinced of my doubt. Perhaps they're zen in their waiting for a meal to pass by. Compassion seems to be a need for more complex creatures such as ourselves who disallow cannibalism. But all this wondering has nothing to do with breakfast.
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