So, I was reading some Emily Dickinson today-Hey, stop laughing, I can read Emily if I wanna...
Anyhow, I came across the following, which I like immensely. For one thing it resonates for me just as it stands, and for another I find it somewhat comforting to know that Emily entertained such thoughts.
The book I was reading from has it listed as "XL" in the series on life. I have no idea what, if any, other titles it has:
Much madness is divinest sense To a discerning eye; Much sense the starkest madness. 'T is the majority in this, as all, prevails. Assent, and you are sane; Demur, - and you're straightway dangerous, And handled with a chain. - Emily Dickinson
"She loved me for the
dangers I had pass'd, and I loved her that she did pity them.” He read
back what he had typed - “Wait, Billy already wrote that, didn't he
..." *
And then "Over the
mountains of the Moon, down the valley of the shadow - ride, boldly ride, the
shade replied, if you seek for Eldorado. “ Back-spaces rapid-fire through
the entire first line - “No, no - Eddy wrote that one” he thought. **
Since they had made conversant
past time visitation possible he had talked to so many of the old writers,
poets, thinkers, and fools of his kind that the line between his thoughts, his
writings, rantings, and revelations, sometimes blurred with those of the past others.
Still, he did enjoy the visits greatly more often than not.
Einstein was a hoot, especially
after a few shots of schnapps, always a sideways twist to make you look at
something again with that one.
Machiavelli, not surprisingly, Ben
thought was an ass.
They said it was possibly a
side effect of the Sb-5 he had been dosed with at the indian clinic that made
him susceptible to the visions. His participation in the trials of the new formula
paid for his therapy and a few others. It was part of a government Earned
Funding deal the clinic was forced into back in '25.
From his regular overstuffed
chair at Irah's coffee house just across from the Goose Hollow rail he watched
the college kids in their current fashion gear, ear buds in, eyes trained on
mobile screens. Bright shiny young things, some of them destined to change the
world yet again “in myriad ways, both subtle and gross.” Ben thought.
Since he had fallen below the
income requirement to own a car he spent more time at places like Irah's
waiting for trains, or nursing endless cups of the house blend and cruising
social media on the house wi-fi with his beat up old Maruishi locked into one
of the hanging racks outside.
He would sit and watch all the
people, all the things, just watch, and listen. The layers and threads of connections,
the nodes in the data between the thousand-thousand things, would start coming
to him latter. Sometimes they came in
his dreams, flying through the tangled dream-time oak branches on silent owl
wings. Sometimes he saw them in the abstract
patterns that he had first learned from the Sb-5 years before.
Drinking his first Double-Dark
Chocolate Ethiopian Drip, almond milk, no foam, triple raw sugar of the day he
gazed out the window and across Jefferson Avenue at the roundabout. In
its center was an old, old, Mound Stellar built up of rough boulders to about
two meters high. On the top of the mound, flat tops of the odd boulders
angled up to the southwest sky, individual stones stood in a rough circle,
perhaps five or six yards across.
No one ever seemed pay much
attention to it or go up on top of it though there was nothing preventing it.
Nothing of course except the odd "You're not supposed to be here" feeling
that most people who might have done got when they reached a certain proximity.
Most of those people forgot both the feeling and the mound as soon as they
walked away from it.
Ben did not forget, because
along with that feeling he also got something else. It was like a silent
disclaimer, an "unless" clause to the warning vibration. There was
something that appealed to his non-conformist nature there, something that appealed to the old ones.
Sipping his coffee there he
watched as the light on the mound slanted towards that "photographers
best" side light. He could have sworn he saw a shimmering there. There was
something different, something else there on top besides the expected few small
trees and shrubs, besides the sparse tufts of grass growing from between the
rocks, besides anything that he recalled a name for.
It could have just been that he
was tired. Beyond tired.
This fatigue existed in him in
spite of all the advances in technology, or the progress towards a “more
orderly and sustainable society". His Dr claimed it was largely
neurological, a genetic fault of his, a misfiring of synapses aggravating
wildly unbalanced dispersal and uptake of serotonin and dopamine in his brain.
He had hoped to speak with someone more
astute, one of the philosophers or mental health people of not too distant
history maybe, but then the technology had abruptly broken down,
catastrophically, according to all the government and industry spokespersons.
Ben felt himself no longer
capable of discerning truth from fiction, propaganda (a banned word) from
information. He did know that when conversant past time visitation had come
into being there was a general lack of consensus regarding exactly how
that actually worked.***
It was almost time for him to
board the Blue Line to Hillsboro. He had the barista top off his go cup,
picked up his Gabriel Hounds daypack and headed out the door. He went the longer way towards the stone
mound.
Even though he had felt the "Go Away" buzz before, it still
came as something of a minor shock to his system and he
stumbled just a bit, one of those odd little two-step glitches, but retained
his vertical attitude. The closer he got to the edge of the mound the more the
buzz manifested itself as a multiple electro-magnetic waveform, capable of simultaneously
overpowering in both the utra and sub-sonic ranges. His skin tingled, the hairs
on the back of his neck stood at full "Danger, Will Robinson!" attention.
At the same time he felt a massive presence, a tangible weight upon his shoulders,
as well as a rumbling deep in his bones that told him something big was right
in front of him, something huge, something that appeared to be moving towards
in slow motion, even as it moved at speeds beyond any attempt to describe or
define. It was coming. It was here. Just like that.
He paused and in his peripheral
vision he could just see the Methodist church across the street, shimmering
wildly, as though seen through heat waves on a Mojave Desert summer day.
He stepped forward again. He heard
the customary tinnitus ring in his head take on a new, more energetic vibrato,
and again he paused. He almost expected to be struck dead or at least
deaf and blind as he stepped forward again, that one last step, to place his
shaking hand on the stone. Everything stopped. Every. Thing.
No sound, no movement of
traffic or pedestrians, or anything at all, stirred up close to the roundabout.
There was not even the ringing in his ears, utter silence and total stillness
was all around him.
He remembered to breath. He
climbed up on top of the mound. He looked around. Loosely spaced
around the top of Tsik'to'li Unelanvhi, the eye of
God, were rough upright stones, a meter or two tall each. Ben
stepped forward again. He laid his hand on the petite monolith.
If anyone else had gotten close
enough to see through the glamour of the mound over the next few years, they might
have noticed there on top a weathered daypack, much faded by sun, wind, and
rain. It had been there for all time, a remnant left by an Old One - by
Agigalie liga Kway nee, by I-Am-Grateful Ben.
** Eldorado, Edgar Allen Poe - http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/eldorado/
*** It had occurred, it seemed, as an accidental
result of a collaboration of indie geeks and volunteers from the Applied
Physics Department of the Unseen University trying to find a practical use for
the Holographic Theory.
*** It had occurred, it seemed, as an accidental result of a collaboration
of indie geeks and volunteers from the Applied Physics Department of the Unseen
University trying to find a practical use for the Holographic Theory.
The picture has nothing to do with the post as far as I know. I just like it.
No fun stories today. No foggy insights bristling with fuzzy logic, inane intuitions, or rampant chemical imbalances(I hope).
I just read my last two posts.
I am disappointed to find them rife with poor usage and typos, awkward, full of thingys, and otherwise an embarrassment of goofy errors. Yes, I know better than to let them go out that way. Ok, I mostly know better, some issues of sentence structure still elude me.
Don'tcha just hate it when that happens? Oh, that has never happened to you? Um, yeah, me either.
Mia Culpa. Next time I'll read it through another time, instead of just three or four.
Yes, ok, out loud. Oh, and that other part that seems really odd, that's just how my mind works - I make no apologies for that.
I will be as Silly Putty, stretch some more, break, moosh together again, and bounce back somewhere near I hope to the often obscured and invisible writing path I persist in following.
I stole that Silly Putty bit from @johannaharness, fair & square, I think.
He Who Must Not Be Trifled With was back on the road. It was
not really a road though, as it was actually a cow path through a pasture just east of
Liberal, Kansas. He had taken some time off the trip to commune with the other more
interesting denizens of the forest. This had given things out west time to
simmer for a while. He had been careful to not let any more of the local people
wherever he passed through see him. He knew that in this time, even more than
in the past, the sight of a small hybrid dragon would cause the kind of stir he
was just not interested in right now.
Although he often
thought of himself as wyvern, probably because that was what his dear mother
had been, he was actually not exactly that. He had too many legs, four of them
instead of the usual two. He had fur instead of scales. He was much more intelligent
than any wyvern who ever lived before. He could affect things from great
distances if he so chose.
Andy, way out west, just outside of Colby, Oregon, a bit east of Portland, that bastion of high hopes, Murder Buy the Book, and awesome views was now learning to live with his
new bestest friend, Bernard. Not a St Bernard, but still a very large, friendly, slobbery and
extremely(thanks to He-Who) intelligent dog. A dog of great imagination who still kind of remembered
having been a bear, and before that, something… else. He would get around to Andy and Bernard later though.
Right
now He Who Must Not be Trifled With’s feet were tired and bitchy. He
had still not yet gained enough strength back to fly. He had forgotten
how much
he considered walking to be appropriate only as a leisure activity, a novelty,
for
more closely scrutinizing ground life. It was Not, decidedly not, in his informed estimation, an acceptible means of
traveling long distances. At least he was getting his memory back, and with
it, some
of his former intelligence. He now knew why he had woken up after so many centuries of sleep. It was about
to
happen again and there was, or was not, about to be a shift in the world of men.
One could say that it was a Good verses Evil thing, but he preferred to think of it as a moving forward or not thing. The one he was going to go see, to teach, to
protect and enlighten, would make a difference. If that one went one way things
would move forward, as they could, to a new level of human thought and
understanding, which in turn would affect the rest of the natural world. If
that one were not protected, not shielded
from chaos and shown a new way, then things could go decidedly
different.
And of course there
would be opposition. Like the plot of any good book or script, there seemed to
always have to be that opposition. It was a question it seemed of maintaining
the balance of all things. Besides, it was more fun that way. To him personally, it would be no particular
catastrophe if it didn’t go his, or perhaps their, way. He was used to things
in this world not always working out to the most optimal, or the most benign way.
He had seen evil empires come and go. He had seen mass extinctions, continental drift,
Pandemics – human and otherwise, all come and go again. He recalled his conversations
with a certain Emperor Huizong of the Song Dynasty on the subject:
At
one point a a
couple of millennium back Emperor Huizong in China, though they didn’t
call it
that there then, had sent out an edict. OK, more like a question really.
He
gathered all his advisers and far-seers from the land to ask what one
thing
would be true in all earthly mortal situations. They had gathered in
their
robes and their finery, deliberated, debated cussed and dis-cussed until
many, many water buffalo had returned to the rice paddy, and of course,
in the nature of all efforts to seek truth by consensus, had failed
miserably to come up with anything remotely resembling a right answer.
Huizong,
a painter and philosopher of no small talent, needed
to get back to a particularly nice lily, whose vibrant essence and
delicate personage he had been attempting to capturein watercolors for a
considerable time. The Wyvern had known that without this
one, silly little saying, the Dynasty could not reach the next level in
understanding the nature of being. Finally He Who Must NOt be Trifled
With made an appearance in his austere and greatly enlightened self,
before
the Emperor. It was the utmost in privacy of course, as it would not do
to be seen by the masses. He
had kept the Emperor on edge for a considerable and appropriate length of time.
He found that the full toothy-venomous fanged smile was not needed here in this
place of relative civilization(for that time). Rather, an understated medium faint grin
was more than sufficient to keep the gentle(for that time) man’s attention
without making any crass threats.
Finally He-Who spoke: “Do you want to know now? Do you really
want to know?” “Yes. Yes old friend, I
feel it is important beyond my reckoning or surely you would not have
come all
this way through so much time and space, just to partake of my meager
tea time
offerings”. “Then I will tell you. It is…Wait, why Zhao Ji, is that a
new kind
of lily I see on the end table?” “Please!" said Emperor of all he
beheld, except of course He-Who. "Don’t tease an old fool so
unmercifully, you wicked teaser in the possession of all knowledge
you!”(The emperor did tend to lose all
cleverness when rattled in the most charming child like way) "I beg of
you! I prostrate myself before you!” "Surely without your tutelage I and
all my empire, tawdry and base as it must seem to you, shall all expire
in the misery of vital knowledge Unattained, lost to all generations!"
“Heh,
heh Zhao Ji, How could I refuse one so eloquent beyond both his years
and his species?" smoothed the half Wyvern, many centuries Young
Zhao Ji's senior and loving the rare attention (They had stopped calling
Huizong that when he got to be Emperor, But
He Who Must Not be Trifled With called everyone by whatever name He chose) “Very well, young Zhao Ji, it is not anything very complicated
it’s just(pointing towards the lily) – This too, shall pass way.” “Of course it
will, tea time will be over whenever we, I mean you of course, say that it is!”
“But, Please, tell me!” “I just did.” said He Who-.
“What?!”cried the Emperor, totally not getting it. “I told you young Emperor. This. Too. Shall
Pass”. “Well, yes, but – but , really I would think …wait! You are right!” And
the wyvern was, at least up to the level
any human was able to comprehend at that time. Whatever you thought, whatever
was happening, in it’s time, would also pass out of being, and be no more.
Oh sure, now days, at least as recently as that nice young
man Al Einstein had said(such a nice
boy, and he too had passed) - As Al had said “In the end all is energy. It can
be no other way.” Something some of
the more thoughtful of the human race were still wrapping their heads around,
as the youngsters would say.
He who Must Not be Trifled With stayed a bit more, in fact
spent the next fifteen years gently and patiently(well mostly
patiently)pounding it through Emperor Huizong’s’s head that “This too Shall Pass”,
while seeming almost insultingly simple, ultimately had far reaching
philosophical and indeed scientific implications.
Then, just before He Who left the now truly old Emperor, he gifted
him with the disturbing proclamation of “Unless of course you want to delve
into physics, quantum and beyond, where everything will be up for grabs again
in the One True Thing scheme of things. The Emperor was both laughing and crying
at the same time as the ageless Wyvern winged his way off towards the west, where he
said there was need of “some serious attitude adjustment”.
Little Head-Bob woke up. He could hear the
wind through the oaks and the cedar trees. He could feel a draft coming
in the hole to the nest. Spring here, his first, was still a little
chill in the mornings. He was warm though, huddled up with all his
brothers and sisters so close. His mother’s silent appearance with a
still warm squirrel was met with enthusiastic hoots and rasps from four
different adolescent beaks.
Just out the hole in the oak, where where
they all sat digesting, was the remains of another oak, worn by weather
and eaten by termites. There was little left but a ring of bare trunk
about as tall as an owl, and one almost flat side rising to about the
height of a buck’s shoulder. The outer surface of this side, bark long
gone, showed something else that fascinated Head-Bob, something he had
never seen anywhere else.
It was the face of a man, prominent nose,
eyes set deep under heavy brow and staring up, directly at the entrance
to the nest. Little Head-Bob had never seen a man. All he knew was that
this face, so different to him, was of something strong and fierce.
Perhaps it was a spirit, some guardian of the woods , perhaps one of
those he heard sighing and whispering in the night.
On the far side of the small woods, other
beaks were raising more raucous voices, grating and challenging. They
changed the feeling of the woods and indeed the air itself. The Murder
of Crows was awake and casting about for whom, as they say, it might
devour.
Though it was normally his family’s habit
to stay in the nest most of the day, they did sometimes go out into the
limbs of their tree to watch and to listen to their woods.
With his
keen ears he could hear the distant sound of the crows. He had never
seen a crow either, but he had heard them calling through the woods. He
somehow knew their strident voices, heard first from this way and then
that, meant nothing good. Still, he wondered just what all that noise
was really about.
Perhaps today was a good day to go for a
little flight. As he hopped to the edge of the limb and pushed off into the air he heard his brother and sisters rasping and calling in dismay at
his abrupt departure. he stopped in a nearby persimmon tree to watch
the remarkable progress of a tortoise crashing loudly through the
remnants of last year’s dead leaves. He wondered how something so like a
rock moving at such a slow pace could make so much noise.
He continued on across the wood, thinking
about the tortoise, he had forgotten about the crows. As he flew on,
suddenly there was a crow, another entirely new thing to him, flapping
from limb to limb, all the time cawing more and more loudly and
alarmingly. Another crow, then another, and another until Little
Head-Bob was surrounded by many crows, diving at him, hopping along the
nearest branches as though in mock attack.
He hissed. He flapped and
spread his wings in warning display. The crows were not impressed or
frightened. He dove out of the tree, right at two crows nearest, but
they were too fast, to agile for him to touch. And still as he tried to
get away from them, away from their noise, the crows pursued.
Little did he know, but would soon
discover, he had just met his second greatest enemy and possible
nemesis. It was not uncommon for an owl to be continually and
relentlessly harassed and pursued, both day and night, until unable to
sleep or to hunt the owl would weaken, succumb and die. The crows had a
system. They had numbers. They could, by working is shifts, keep up
their siege well beyond the strength of any one bird to match. As the
day wore on Head-Bob learned, bit by bit, of the nature of crows.
As he perched, his back up against the
trunk of the tree, hissing and snapping at the crows, he began to pick
up another sound. Some other unknown creature, was making its way into
the woods. Though most of his attention was on the jeering crows, he
could still track the sounds of the new thing enough to realize it was
coming directly towards him. Was this, he wondered some new foe, taking
advantage of his vulnerability to end his short life?
But when the creature emerged from a copse
of cedars The young Great Horned Owl saw something he never would have
expected, even more remarkable the murder of crows. It was a large
thing, walking on two legs, covered in something not fur, not feather,
nor even scales. It carried in its upper limbs something even more
remarkable, a long shiny thing that smelled of fire, some mineral, and
somehow, some new definition of death.
As Little Head-Bob perched, his back
against the trunk of the tree, transfixed by the shear strangeness of
the thing below, it did a new thing. It turned its head and, staring
him straight in the eye, showed him its face, showed him the face in
the woods. It was the face he had seen all his life, carved in the stump
by his nest.
The thing looked at Head-Bob. It looked at
the crows. It looked at Head-Bob, and again at the crows, and then at
the thing it carried. Its face, as it watched the crows, took on a
harder even more intimidating cast. It raised the thing and pointed it
at the crow nearest to Head-Bob. He saw it hopping towards him on the
limb above his. The world exploded. It ended with the sound and the fury
of a thousand thunder claps.
The young owl sat up in the grass below,
the crow lay dead a small way in front of him. The rest of the crows had
taken off, but hadn’t gone far. They were mumbling now in the next
tree, to themselves, or the owl, perhaps to the man.
The man spoke,
another new thing. He spoke to the crows. He spoke to the owl.
“You no-good sons a bitches are gonna learn
to leave my owls alone! And you, young feller, better get back to
Mommy and Daddy while I instruct these miscreants and your gettin’ is
good.”
Little Head-Bob stayed crouched where he was, unable to move.
The man, the Spirit of the Woods, waited
one – two – three breaths.
“I mean leave! Now! And do try to pay
attention to who’s around next time, would you?”
Little Head-Bob jumped into the air and
flew faster than he had ever flown. Behind him the sound of a thousand
thunders came again, and again, and once more. He went straight back to
his own tree, back to his nest. He buried his face under his wing,
overcome by too much fear and too much amazement, over the crows, over
the man, the face in the woods.
Bob woke up. He looked around him at the
cold dead remnants of last night’s camp fire. He looked at the sandstone
before him there on top of the hill at the edge of the woods.
Everything seemed different, more serious, and more miraculous than he
had ever seemed to feel before. He had no idea why. There was something,
some feeling … he just couldn’t remember.
He got up, rolled his
sleeping bag and started off towards the house. He wanted coffee, that
first, best cup of the day. He thought he might get his tools, go back
up into woods today, work on that carving of his father’s face. The one
he hadn’t seen in too long.
I seem to have ground to a halt on rewriting my '11 NaNo project. I'm not sure where to go from here. It's been in the back of my mind, and seems to be intent on staying there for a while. Instead of beating my head against the proverbial wall, I think it's time to do some things different. Some different things.
I'm thinking on some short story ideas, & some Impressions(poetry)
Oh, and thanks for "tuning in" - Here's Bruce Cockburn, live on KINK.FM, at the Bing Lounge in Portland - Lovers in a Dangerous Time , from the album Stealing Fire - to make it worth the trip.
If you think in terms of a "trip" in the old LSD "trippin" sense, then the phrase "worth the trip" takes on a little different meaning, huh?
Okay, one more for old time's trippin's sake - Jimi Hendrix, Are You Experienced, title track from his 1967 debut. I first heard Jimi in my big brother G's dorm room at St John's Lutheran College in Winfield, Kansas. I think it must have been 1968, because G. also had a new copy of the follow up Axis Bold as Love (1967 in UK, but not released in USA till '68) I think this may have been where the ancient and venerable term "Acid Rock" came into parlance, and for good reason.
#15 Recalling red tail hawks in KS, how they prefer to nest high in sycamore trees, next to creeks. How an adolescent will circle for hours on end, crying for it's parents to come feed it, when it could be hunting. How they watch from fence posts, and tilt their heads in thought.
#16 So - if sound waves are capable of molecular changes to matter, might
constant 8k MHz tinnitus ring change brain, or is wave even there?
# 17 Sitting in my therapists waiting room, which is louder, The Ring or the white noise machines? Um, The Ring.
#18
Standing in the Portland rain, in the evening, watching the cherry tree, its branches bare in winter. Feeling the wind, feeling it's curves.
#19Half light, just pre-dawn / driving my son to his school / Small blizzard, huge flakes // #senryu#haiku#amwriting
#20 Half past January. In the last two hours the precipitation has gone from rain to snow and back again, three times. Snowing out the window now, flakes the size of quarters. Fire place going. The Ring is up loud. Now it's Winter in Portland.
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