Night Oddity

 

Meditation on Cursors at Night.

The cursor blinks, black line, nothing, black line, nothing, black line, flashing, white, absence. If you stare with focus at the black line and then the absence of it, you see in that white space a super white space, a bright white line, brighter than the blank page. But while you need to maintain a strong focus on the general area, you also have to allow your eyes to blur, to lose a bit of very specific focus, so that the white line can surface.

The cursor beats with your music playing somewhere from the computer; it's the speakers, of course, but where before that? The page sparkles and shifts with brighter white patches, the more you stare with the sounds filling the spaces around you. This is your meditation.

When the music is finished, you have the cursor still. It continues to beat so silently, but so obviously. The ears hear nothing, nothing like what they heard with the thick flow of music. The eyes see still. The ears suck in the silence, searching.

And then in a bit more time, the silence becomes loud. The ears pick up any little noise, any little tap of a bug flying into the mesh screen on the window. The eyes don’t see this, because of the black outside at night. The eyes just stay focused on the cursor--the cursor, always there against the white screen of the computer which works at any time in the 24-hour segments you blink into and out of. But the sounds float and change now. One sound or another is always there, with each sound distinct and separated from the others. In the spaces, quiet continues to cascade around the sounds, rushing like a waterfall, washing over everything, making an aural white landscape where the pricks of sounds on the ears are cursors.

In the wash of everything, you search for the cursors, and your eyes or ears or fingers are drawn to them. You find the cursors, compelled by cursors, guided by cursors.

The back is hunched a bit as you sit. You feel it, the slouch of your front self into your back self. You create a cursor, thinking that if you drew over the curve of it in thick black, you’d get a long, rounded or crescent cursor down your spine.

If you reached around to your spine and grabbed the new cursor, you’d have a slender black bow. You can change the cursor, if you straightened your back perfectly, and drew another line, and reached back again; you’d have a blunt black cursor arrow to shoot from your curved cursor bow. These ideas are strange to you, though, so holding them in your mind is somewhat of a challenge. You are attracted to aural cursors and to physically visual cursors all around you. It is another thing, the imagined cursor that you craft on your back, behind you. There is a great deal of fading and coming back into focus.

So now everything continues to blink like the cursor on the page, flickering in the mind, difficult to hold still, always pulsing, always.

It comes and it goes and it comes and it goes.

You are intrigued by your creation enough to block out some of the other cursors for a time. You take your bow, and you load your arrow gently over it. You draw it back, your elbow bends effortlessly. Your face rests near your hand which steadies your weapon. You prepare to release, the mind holding strongly, solidly to this arrow and bow so that it doesn’t flicker when you release. You want the shot to work. You are aiming right into the night, the big black expanse, out the screen of the right window in your bedroom. You are aiming for the bug trapped in the spider web on the outside-side of the screen. You want the arrow to pierce through the bug’s thorax, wherever it beats--the heart, the veins, whatever is in that tiny bug--and then to keep traveling, launching out of this world and to the moon. You hope for the arrow to then stab right into the crater eye of the man in the moon, so he blinks and blinks and blinks, tearing up a bit. He will rub his face and then finally target the arrow, plucking or flicking it and the bug out of himself, in great relief for nothing nagging, now at peace. The arrow-shish-kabob-bug fall back down to earth.

You’ll go out into the yard in the morning and search around for a bit, to gather up your bow and arrow. You'll carefully remove the bug's still body from the skewer and search for a place to bury him, a place you’ll bless gently. You'll bury him in a frame of four small black twigs you'll break and fashion, and then you'll put him in a shallow hole under the tree from which you picked the twigs.

You’ll go to work still in this early morning, and you'll reflect on your actions from your cursor meditation from the night before.

So you keep the bow and arrow steady now, the night still around you. You shoot. It flies. You do not see where the arrow goes. Only tomorrow will tell if you’ve held the cursor still enough to work. You may have shot when it was bright white. And who knows what that means. I mean, who knows what that means?

Window Writing

 While walking today, I hugged the warm core of my body, and felt the blood in my leg that is sore.
A bit before this hug, in finger and dust, the drivers' ed window read, "Mel Malone is a whore," which struck me, grabbed me, and I did not want it there anymore. So in passing and walking, I looked around for something with which to wipe the words away, but found nothing but leaves still attached to trees. I did not want to hurt or deface the trees in breaking their branches, even though Mel was sprawled out, exposed on the face of the glass. The dust was so thick, luckily I couldn't see my own face in the window's reflection, in the words, or I would have made weird or unwarranted connections. So I kept walking, realizing that I had only my hand to smear the words away. The window looked too strange and dirty for me to use my own palm, my skin and muscles; so I passed by completely, having felt sad, and bad, and then worse, hoping so much that Mel would not see those words, or me.

An Exchange at Dunkin' Donuts

This is admittedly something some people might think is written about or talked about quite a bit, too much. But it is what it is, it strikes me, still, as I observe, and I record. I wonder who else is struck by basic life, and what, specifically, strikes them.

It is for your viewing:

The mother goes to relieve herself in the bathroom while her son approaches the counter and looks at the signs. One sign shows frozen “Coolatta” drinks in neon colors, blue, orange, yellow. “New!” it reads. Another sign has a white star in the center of a blue and red target, with a large red Coolatta proudly displayed alone in the foreground. “The Coolest Way To Be A Hero… New! Cherry Flavor.” It’s the popular Captain America logo.

The son is about ten years old. He waits, appearing to scan the signs. There is an oversized white coffee mug with a dollar sticking out, for tips. The boy fidgets and turns to look at the soda and drink cooler. In a moment, he turns back and leans against the counter. The clerk has not approached him to ask if he needs assistance.His mother returns from the Women’s Room, straightening her shirt, and the clerk swiftly approaches. The mother and son are both overweight. The mother picks at the front of her pant leg to loosen it from her thigh while her gaze remains fixed on the menu.

The boy opens the cooler and reaches his hand inside to take an orange Gatorade drink, then stands next to his mother at the counter. He sets the Gatorade down and decisively says, “chocolate glazed,” while looking forward at the doughnuts, which are arranged in three large columns with four rows each, the doughnuts lined tightly together on metal racks, slanted downward for customers to view with ease and visual appeal—the pink frosting, the rainbow sugar sprinkles, the tiny chopped nuts, the maple syrup frosting, the sugar glaze on light cake donuts, dense sourdough, and fluffy French crullers, the chocolate frosting on chocolate fried dough, the red, purple, clear yellow jellies oozing out from inside sticks of fried dough. The mother does not turn towards her son, but replies, scanning, “Chocolate glazed… let’s see…Ok.” She has spotted the chocolate glazed donuts, so then indicates the choice to the cashier without hesitation.

The cashier takes a thin white paper tissue, picks up the desired doughnut, and puts the doughnut into a brown paper bag, folding the top of the bag over two times. The mother grabs the bag and a coffee she must have ordered in a quick and quiet voice, while the boy clutches his Gatorade. The mother hands the clerk a small plastic card to pay for the goods, and then the two turn and leave the store. They get into their large red SUV that gleams in the bright sun, driving off in a direction I cannot see.

It is into the store, into the bathroom, straight to the ordering counter, into the bag, out of the bag, into the body. There, in and out of the body, in and out of the car, in and out of the mind, from the cold of the cooler or the doughnut racks to the room temperature of the store, to the heat of the throat and stomach and blood to the intestines or bladder and out again into the bathroom into the toilet and flushed through the pipes, out to the water, into the treatment plant, back to the faucet or shower, the dirt on and off the body, in and out of the holes of the body...
...the stores, the cars, the food, the toilets, the talking, the taking, the motioning, the signaling, the swiping, the paying, giving and taking, sopping and wasting.

In a day, every day, it is done and done, a couple minutes here, another exchange there, at home eating lunch, drinking coffees, drinking water, drinking lemonade, eating crackers, snacks of chips and ice cream because it’s hot and it’s summer and it’s America and it’s available and on display, signs saying to us in the boldest, most exciting colors, “yes, yes take and eat, gather up goods, store up life points, something to do; yes, then process, use, expel what you want or need to make room for the same goods again, or different new goods, or don’t use the goods, just keep them until they break or expire, throw them away to gather in a public landfill heap or leave them in your garage to gather in a personal home heap, forget about the old things just enough so you want new things, and enter another store and get what you need, buy away.”

Perhaps take a moment and watch today.

"Experimental Story" from September 27, 2007, with some August 3, 2011 edits.

The late-summer dew on the grass at dawn: I would lay there, belly down on the earth, at 5:30 in the morning, my eyes level with the drop-laden blades, if I didn’t care so much about getting my clothes wet. I really would. I really want to, I say to myself.
I would lay there and would look deep into the grass stretching for hundreds of feet ahead of me, the thousands of skinny green lines crossing and weaving in and out of each other; one water orb loses its friction and slides into another, the attraction of their bonds too much to resist, and they collide in a sparkling subtle explosion. Then the grass blade bends and the new larger water orb tumbles off, the blade springs back up, and the dew drop loses itself altogether as it splatters on the ground and is sucked in.

Then I'd roll over the cool morning field in a state of calm rapture for having witnessed the journey of that dew drop into the earth. My clothes would have sopped up hundreds of other drops as I rolled. Or I'd be naked, and my skin would become soft and slick with this dew water that had floated through the heavens, rising some time before, through the past day or night, possibly from some stream or lake away from here, then condensing as it encountered the heat of the earth; so it settled as it did, gently on the green field--an individual drop or two or three on each blade.

I would be bathed in this. The water would seep into me and wrinkle my fingers eventually.

I'd still myself again and gaze. I’d blow on one of those dewy globes—they’re not mere drops of water, see; they’re crystalline or something, quartz, glass, clear and radiant and polished, petit, delicate—and I’d send my breath in a steady current until the dew reached the apex of its grass blade’s curve, and then I’d gently position my finger below, give one final blow to tip it over the edge, and let it trickle onto my fingertip.

Then I’d smell it. Then I’d taste it.

Then I’d turn over onto my back, eyes on the sky that would be smeared with melting pink clouds, the sun rising up beneath them, hallelujah, rays would find my dampened stomach, maybe a soft steam would rise from my body, visible breath out from the lungs in me, early light glow
like golden yellow-orange,
not too opaque,
mist, droplet,
emerald-lime-olive-pine-sea greens,
auburn-sepia-coffee-chocolate soil,
cerulean-turquoise-aquamarine-mixed-with-white sky,
still not too opaque,
mellow-yellow-spring-yellow-moonlight-yellow-in-the-morning flowing sun,
lightly amber-tinted pastel-rose spotty clouds,
color, color, color,
senses overwhelmed in the calmest possible way.
Hallelujah... Dear God.

And I see,
I feel with abandon.

I really, really would love to do this.
I think of these things of fresh liberation--BE A FREE SPIRIT!--very frequently.

But
I guess I’d rather not get my clothes wet, and I’d probably rather not wake up at 5:30 in the morning. That is, right now, my blunt and honest reality. That is my mind.

I would love to dance around in sheets and sheets of rain, shrieks of glee, my untempered self for once, not critical, not ashamed, not awkward because I think I should be doing this or that, I think someone is watching.

I would love to cover my body in mud. I would love to kneel in the middle of a city street and examine cracks in the pavement as people walk by. I'd be barefoot and would feel every texture under my heels and toes. I would love to, I would love to, I would love to--

But I’d get soaked and I’d get dirty with the mud, and to clean myself afterwards would be an ordeal, and I can’t ruin my jeans because they cost me $40. And in the city, people would see me. People would see me picking at the concrete, watch me, stare, see how "weird" I can be.

This is how I have actually lived for the most part. Frightened. Self-conscious. Delicate.

(And of course, yes, of course I know... What does it really matter if "people" see me? We most likely wouldn’t even encounter each other again, they’d barely give me a passing glance in the first place. Yes, yes, there is that realization.)

There’s a lot of missed meaning in my life.

But, right?  Don't you think it does matter...? I mean, they’d see my bare feet on the dirty concrete. They’d see that I wasn't bothered by it. They'd think I was "trying to be a hippie." They'd think I was dirty. They'd think I have no right to be so free.
They'd see me untamed, a savage, an animal in the field. What business would I have to be up at 5:30 in the morning when I don't have work until 2 in the afternoon?
I would disturb people!
Right?
Or ...it's me who I'd disturb?
I would unravel.

June at Night

6/5/10

In the morning, it is quiet.

The night left us with blackness. We had had no flashlight. Heather had her guitar in one hand, and I gripped her arm tightly so that my knee banged against the guitar case. It had rained, and the paths through Camp Ohiyesa were muddy and slick. There was not even enough light to cast a reflection dimly on a puddle at our damp shoes. I smelled the wetness in the air. I was afraid, but I could not help but to stop and look up at the stars.

            “If the clichés are all true, Heather—millions of years old, the light of the stars.”

            She looked up, said nothing, but I knew she felt it. There was doubt, there was distance from the beauty. Millions of physical miles. Millions in our minds, detachment from the universe. There was the beauty, though. We stood enveloped within it. The stars were framed by the tops of trees leaning in to form an oval expanse of dark navy heaven. Their infant lights crowded together to fill the space above, small and twinkling; and, too, at once, their ancient gaze, wise and ghostly, and we the same, or so I hoped. There was the cool night, and there was the fear of what we couldn’t see or name or touch in all of the blackness of the towering trees and masses of shrubs, the blood-sucking mosquitoes, the quiet nothing laying out and around us, a clean sound canvas for the croaks of bullfrogs who spoke to us, genuinely and calmly in a language we could only hear—no hope for understanding. I still gazed upward, still clutching her arm. The stars spread before us.  

Turning In, Into, To, Through, Throughout, Out

At 10:27pm, just as lightning flashed and heavy rain drops began to fall from a hot mid-May sky, the silver SUV in front of me turned left off of two-lane Inkster road. As and after the silver vehicle had gone from my central visual field (because my neck stayed still; and my eyes only moved slightly, passively, regarding whatever came before them), I caught the red glow of a still-burning cigarette, moving diagonally across the pavement and toward the shoulder as I drove over its rolling or tumbling path.

I assumed the man in the SUV had been smoking. I watched the cigarette butt, the red dot intently, though with detachment.

I turned on my windshield wipers. I had witnessed the little fire before it went out. I gazed into the rain as it splashed on the glass, and was smeared away to dribble down the metal car body, and then drip flying backwards with the wind caused by driving, falling onto the pavement, blending with everything, becoming invisible.

The tires, my tires, grazed over the wet ground. The rain graced me with height, motion, some sort of divine lightness coming from where it had fallen onto the road and upwards; the rain lifted the car and I flew, turning and turning, spinning to follow the path of the silver SUV, flashing red and white lights, and then darkness. I had witnessed the fire before it went, before I went, I had witnessed the fire. 

Fall On Knees

Out the panes of your eyes, through the windows of the building, you look and see the world in the open is of trees, and inside, of dreams, memories. The world is of musical tones that flow together and make you cry for no apparent reason; but the reasons are deep and have seeped through your skin, through your muscles and bones, into your bloodstream, and they have knocked on the door of your beating heart, like Jesus Christ (let It be), and demanded entry, but patiently. The reasons did not force their way in, but they sat there outside your sacred house or scared or scarred heart so persistently that you could do no other than let them in, and you didn’t even know you’d opened the door. And then you hear a song one day down the road, and you start clenching up, startled that you were open, getting tight and hot, and you cover your face with your hands, bury yourself into yourself, and start breathing hard because you feel tears coming and don’t know why they should or if they really will. And you’re in a public place. And you’re amazed and ashamed for the seeming abnormality of the event, you, sitting in the middle of the library. And you fold inward again, to the mind, to the page, as a way out of the situation. You begin to write it, what is finishing happening. And this was it. The words have sounded and silenced you. The door is ajar, but only slightly. The song was the moving melody, and certain lyrics you caught, that tripped on the edge of the door and fell inside the heart. Falling, praying, little girl, died, with me, sail around with me, good bye little woman, I’m gone.  

You think, “Here is the song, people. Hear the song, people. Understand me, people.”

You think, “This is stupid, this is mushy, people. I am sorry but I have to share it, people.”

You think, “People?”

You see through the windows the gray sky and the evergreen dim underneath it—really, inside of the sky. The sky doesn’t just sit on top of the world, does it? The sky falls down and around all things on the earth. The evergreen is in the atmosphere.

You think of an animal small and cowering underneath the lowest boughs, the needles catching in its fur, and dirt under its claws as it tries to burrow into the ground.

You’ve only imagined it.

But you let it all stand,

let it be. 

You feel that the animal is not meant for subterranean life. The animal struggles through more pain to burrow in than to stand atop the earth with pricking pine needles and fears of predators outside. The animal stops digging and pokes its head from the branches. The animal scans for danger. 

All is calm.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fb6RYlghiQ