Dear diary,
Always on a peaceful day, when the air is mellow and there is a gentle breeze, someone starts up their lawnmower. The engine on a lawnmower is loud, so it destroys the pleasant atmosphere. Another way that people ruin everything is by blasting their music. A woman was jogging at the park yesterday, and, when she passed by, I could hear twangy wretchedness coming from an audio speaker that she’d hung round her neck. I wish that she would wear headphones. Yet why would you want to cordon off the sounds of your surroundings? Instead of hearing the calls of the crows complaining to one another about their neighbors, you chain a subwoofer to your head and go broadcast your poor taste to all.
I know there’s not exactly any natural silence to besmirch – I just got done saying how the crows blare their criticism caw-caw-cawing against hawks and squirrels and all other life forms which irk them, because crows are smart – but even the most belligerent caw from a crow comes off as a sensitive contribution to nature’s ongoing Readymade Symphony, compared to the musical selection of sweaty park-joggers who sport purple spandex. Yes, the raw noise of wildlife is preferable to anything electronically amplified. (This is not quite true, but please bear with me.)
Do I love or hate Mother Nature? I think I lean towards hatred. But I don’t know myself very well, so that probably means that I secretly admire her. I just think that Nature, like God, is generally negligent; so why should we revere either barbarian? Let them rot in hell. For Nature is big, and God is big, whereas we mortal creatures are small; and the big should help the small, especially because God and Nature collaborated to create this realm in which we shudder and jerk (you call this living?); thus they know all the codes and combinations of reality’s bolt-locks, and all the passwords for its administrative programs, so it’s not hard for Big God and his accomplice Bloody Nature to roll out a welcoming carpet before us, wherever we scamper to. I’m saying that they should watch us—pay attention to your children!—and make miracles smooth our way, continuously. Micromanage existence.
But God and Nature do the opposite: they fall asleep at the wheel, and they let this vehicle that they built—Life Itself—careen off a cliff and explode in flames. Because they know that strange stuff will rise from the ruins. That’s what life really is: an unbreakable concept. So God and Nature watch it from a safe distance while it taints itself with bad music. They never interfere, because: the harder it gets for the current phase of whatever is living, the weirder will be the forms that creep from its wreckage. God and Nature are attracted to improbability. They wanna witness extreme change. They’re testing this experiment to see how far it can go. How bizarre of an aftermath can be achieved. They consider it a success when the most highly advanced creatures find a way to destroy themselves. That’s why God doesn’t descend the spiraling staircase from heaven and swipe our nuclear weaponry away; whereas even some human parents would never let their children play with firearms—also that’s why Mother Nature doesn’t thunderbolt anyone who pours toxic waste into her oceans; God and Nature both perk up at the slightest hint of a chance at megadeath. That’s, for them, the grand finale; the fireworks display; the climax of the movie.
*
I’ve been speaking of God and Nature as existences distinct from us. External, exterior entities, somewhere out there. But, if they exist, are they so seperate? What is that part of us that looks on us as if it isn’t us? I say as if—but maybe it truly isn’t us, at least not altogether (perhaps identities overlap identities). I’m talking about the part of our mind that judges our own actions—one says about oneself “I hate how I acted just now.” It doesn’t seem right for a self to disapprove of anything it did—rather, you’d think that it would say “That’s me: the best way possible to proceed”; but instead we have this component that looks down on itself from outside, partway between the states as if and truly.
Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am . . .
Both in and out of the game and watching and
wondering at it.[—from “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman]
Does this indicate that we’ve “been here” before—at this point of space and time, in this existence (like a groove of a record can be revisited by the needle of a player)—that we’ve “already seen this movie” which is our life, and that we’re “watching it again” like an editor who’s preparing a final cut? Does it mean that the feeling of déjà vu, which we all experience vividly at least fourteen times a day, can be trusted? Are we a divine machine that got demolished and now our ghost is attempting to revamp its bygone glory? What if physical resurrection is possible, except it takes eons, and its conduit is evolution?
*
All this musing about the possibility of “doing over” one’s existence, and about the comparative silence and seeming absence of God and Nature, stems from my anxiety over simple daily tribulations. The pressures of meeting basic needs. I got food (but for how long?), clothing (cursed be it), and shelter: but my shelter needs upgrading. If your roof caves in, ya gotta repair it. Now my roof didn’t cave in (yet); but I’ve been tangled in the web of other duties, and their arduousness yanks me past the brink of despair. I lose my composure. Then I judge myself harshly for being so impatient-uncalm-irate, so easily maddened. So Pauline.
It’s that old fiend Necessity. I refuse to accept it, to acknowledge its authority, so it plays me like catgut. We’ve gotta finish these home “improvements”, so that we can leave this apartment—there’s no other way, so why can’t I just accept whatever comes along, “deal with it”, roll with the punches, instead of raging about repairs that went awry? What use is it, after you accidentally bump into a structure that you forgot was there, to shout an expletive and physically punch the obstruction? Wouldn’t it be better to curse God and die? Because everything is God’s fault, after all, either because God authored the doom or permitted it. And if you’re dead, you can’t bump into a wall—you’d just walk right thru it. So death is pretty much the cure for everything. If you don’t like the way your local butcher prepared the kidney for your breakfast, just kill yourself. For the grave hath no taste buds. You could even say to Elijah (that’s your local butcher’s name), “Dear sir, please prepare ME MYSELF the way that you prepared that awful kidney; then ship the dish, first class, to my enemy Paul. Yes, the saint.” As it is written:
Man breathes the air into him, he swallows food and water. But more than this. He takes into him the life of his fellow men, with whom he comes into contact, and he gives back life to them.
[—from D.H. Lawrence’s essay on Edgar Allan Poe]
This way, at least you’ll get the satisfaction of having ruined Saint Paul’s morning. Because Paul will not hesitate to open the parcel, when it arrives, thus he’ll discover the fare—your own ill-prepared kidney—and he will savor it. Now you’ve become him, and he must suffer you. His mood grows fouler, as you anticipated: you ravage his legacy. And you remain in his mind, criticizing every move he makes. Then you and he can decide where to have yourselves shipped next. I recommend Bryan of Eagan. He’s already prepared a place for Paul of Tarsus in the pantheon of his superego. The seat between Nietzsche and Jesus.
*
But I gotta remember that selling one’s home takes time. Like justice, whose wheels turn boringly slow. It’s not like a street transaction, where you simply drop a banknote on the sidewalk, and a well-dressed man who “just happens to be passing by” discreetly nudges a nearby rock with his loafer; and you interpret his signal properly, after checking that the coast is clear, by lifting the rock and locating the secret panel on its underside which slides open to reveal a hollow center, in which a translucent blue cassette has been deposited; and you retrieve the object, insert it in your portable player, and privately via headphones enjoy the latest symphony by Mozart, who, it turns out, is alive and residing in Neo-Haven, a province of Atlantis, behind a secret panel on Earth, because he outsmarted death by mailing his own soul to his rival Salieri, thus keeping the latter off the scent of his trail, while leaving Death stalled in the celestial courtroom disputing the claim that Mozart’s soul is not Death’s but the Devil’s rightful property, as he (the Devil) holds the legal deed, and thus Death must needs wait to perform his official duty till the item can be traced, which item of course Salieri has already eaten.
No, the act of apartment-selling proceeds far slower than the market for contraband. Apartment-selling is glacier-paced. No man ever walked over to the Ice Age and bit his nails in suspense because he believed that any instant now the pleasure garden of his log mansion will find itself bestrook with frigidity. Glaciers move slower than the big hand on a face clock. You don’t see dogs barking angrily at passing glaciers. Dogs are dignified enough to waste their barking only on bicyclists.
But my Anxiety Production Center does not communicate well with my Reasoning Faculty. I tell myself: What’s the use of worrying about something that’ll take weeks or possibly months to sort out—look: I’m trembling with fear, as if an alligator is attacking me; but this type of fear (fight or flight) is utterly overkill, in this instance: I need a different type of adrenaline; something watered down, like ale versus absinthe; better yet, like light beer: I should have ordered Terror Light—for I can’t grab a tree branch and STAB a potential house sale into existence, nor can I flee from the jaws of a fumbled bank loan (one of my fears is that the potential buyers will have their financing fall thru, and then I’ll have to undergo the process all over again: the process of finding the perfect soul mate, in a love match of buyer-and-seller)—bank loans don’t even possess their own bodies: they only act and exist thru living humans; they’re like parasites—once the host dies, no more loan! (you can’t bury a debt and then resurrect it once it’s partially decayed: and not all loans invariably stink to high heaven)—but I do wish that I could invent a bird so small & cute that it could infiltrate the jaws of the attacking gator, to clean his teeth by pecking the coriander seeds out from between them. But that only happens in the best of all possible worlds.
OK, sorry about the incoherent entry. Now I gotta go play football.
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