(5)

As I entered the cemetery on my walk today – for I could not resist going back there again, as it was yet another warm, beautiful spring day – I noticed a flock of crows gathering in the trees up ahead of me.  It's unusual, in my experience, to ever see more than two or three crows grouped together at once, but fluttering through the treetops today I must have seen forty or fifty at least.  As I walked towards them they kept flying up from one tree and landing in another a little farther on; finally, when I reached the ravine, the whole flock flew into the woods and settled in the treetops on the gully's far side.  I could still hear them squawking in the distance.  I closed my eyes and concentrated closely on the sound:  it seemed to take on the quality of a kind of scratching being made upon the surface of the air.  I've noticed this often lately when I'm walking through the cemetery, this odd new way of experiencing sound:  the calling of birds, the motor of a passing car, the barking of a dog in the distance – to my ear these sounds seem not to be traveling through the air so much as being scratched upon its surface.  Or perhaps I might say that they are like holes being poked through the surrounding silence, each sound making its own uniquely shaped hole.  I don't know how to explain it better; I have no ready conceptual framework with which to describe the experience.  The wind in particular is full of resonance when heard in this curious new way.  It is, of all the "sound-shapes" I have yet perceived, far and away the most beautiful.

There's another strange alteration in my perception that occurs quite frequently now, involving the manner in which I perceive space and time.  For instance:  there's a particular tree I often stand under in the cemetery.  I like its location – it's positioned about a dozen feet back from the edge of the ravine, and there's a large bush growing on one side of it that screens me from the view of passing motorists.  A branch projects out of the tree at a downward angle just above my head – a small, dead branch, without any leaves on it.  Lately, when I look at this branch, as I follow the length of it with my eyes, what I seem most aware of is the way it embodies not only a progression through space, but through time as well.  My eyes rest upon the closest knob in the branch, and then, as they move to focus on the next knob out, they move forward over an object which acts, so to speak, to enclose time.  It's as if the branch is operating as a metaphorical expression of both space and time, simultaneously.  And when I look down at the roots of the tree spreading across the ground, they too look to my eyes like the embodiment, or metaphorical expression, of both space and time.  As I begin walking again, the ground flowing beneath my feet appears to me like the flowing of time itself.  And there, just ahead of me, embodied by the very earth, is – well, is the future, I suppose.  But then, where is the past?  To my thinking, I (and everything around me) exist as the resultant creation of all that ever was; I exist, as it were, at the very apex of the past, which I am constantly in the process of shedding, from which I am constantly emerging, into a future that I perceive extending all about me.  I have a subjective existence (I am created by the world, and from the world's past); I have an objective existence (I create the world; I am emerging into the future).  I know these things because I am a sensual being (I perceive the world via my senses), and thus I am ever existent in the fulsomeness of the present, in the constantly manifesting "here" and "now" (so long, that is, as I keep myself from falling back into the habit of conceptual, conjectural thinking).  The earth is a magical place when viewed this way.  It's full of mystery, and of meaning.  It restores me – or at least begins to restore me – to my proper place in the world.  It restores me to the truth of what I am:  an animal that is also human.  A human-animal.

I'm also aware, however, that I live in a society which provides no fit habitation for those who are geared towards this mode of perception.  I've come to the point where I realize that I live in a society that is often dangerous to me.  Dangerous because it (the world of people who have annexed themselves from their natural environment – i.e. the "civilized" world) is operating to achieve goals which are very much contrary to my own.  I live in a society of people who are, many of them, unknowing, thoughtless, or simply lacking in concern about what they do; a world in which even those who are basically good, and who would do right (and there are many who would), still do not believe, or understand, that profound and fundamental change is necessary in order to accomplish this.  I live in a world of people who have been brainwashed into believing that the civilization in which they live is as great as civilization can ever hope to be:  this is an assertion they never think to challenge.

I must be ever on my guard, living in such a world.  I must be ever vigilant, ever cautious, ever careful.  I must learn to act not only as a Witness to this world, but also as a Warrior within it.

I wonder about the use, the value, of writing to this new position I take.  To act as a Witness, I don't necessarily need to make a record of what I see, beyond the record I keep inside me.  Neither does the Warrior need to be a scribe.  To what purpose, then, do I write?

Writing clarifies my thoughts by making them a manifest part of reality.  For example:  I open a notebook and confront a blank page.  I take pen in hand and begin to scrawl words across the blankness of that page.  In so doing, I transform the page.  I do not merely project my feelings upon it – by my writing I literally transform it:  it is no longer the thing it formally was.  Because this act of transformation is achieved through the process of transcribing my thoughts and feelings, it has a peculiar power.  The act of writing is acutely personal:  it transforms a small part of the world in such a way as to cause that part of the world to become self-revelatory in nature.  That self-revelatory part of the world then becomes a part of the world that is creating me.  Thus, in transforming my world, I also transform myself.  This is true, I suppose, of any creative act; and the more completely a creative act effects the revelation of an individual's core truth, the more profoundly transformative it is, both to the one who enacts the transformation, and to that aspect of the world which is being transformed.

The main material of a writer is language.  Language lacks, perhaps, the transparency of music, the sensuous immediacy of paint or clay; but there is one virtue that is peculiar to language:  like the sound-shapes that make holes in silence, the sound-shapes of language make themselves heard within the receptive silence of the listener (or reader).  Being sound-shapes that transcribe one person's thoughts into the mind of another, they have the power to alter that person's thoughts, and thus, the manner in which that person self-reflects.  Insofar as the language used transcribes conceptual ideas devoid of any relationship to the natural world, to the earth, or to our own animal nature, it may be said to be promoting a species of conceptual thinking that is not grounded in reality.  On the other hand, insofar as it enacts the power to awaken in another the desire for self-exploration and the discovery of the core truth of their being, it may be said to be promoting something useful and good.  In any case, language has the power to transform the reality not only of the blank page of a notebook, or the reality of the writer, but also the reality of another human being.  This is a very potent power.  Great care must be taken here – great care indeed.

As I write these words, I am slowly feeling my way into the future.  As I write these words, they are already slipping into the past.  They are, already, a part of that past of which I am the resultant creation.  Should these words be read by another, they will again enact, in a similar, albeit smaller way, the process of someone else's passage into the future, and then become a part of their inescapable past.  Thus we are slowly groping our way along together; slowly, blindly, we grope our way along this path.  The person to whom I write these words, now, will be, by the time he or she reads them, a thing of the past.  The person who writes these words, now, will be, by the time they are read by another, a thing of the past.  Like travelers from distant planets, we find in each other something that is perceived through the faltering distances of space and time.  And yet we also meet, right here, right now, in the presentness of these words.  The thoughts within my mind are even now living, are even now alive, because they have found their context within the living mind of another.

SPRINGTIME'S FOOL