Yuck: that's a tongue at the top of this collage.
Dear diary,
How does one become Giambattista Vico? How does one become Sigmund Freud? Ralph Waldo Emerson? Michel de Montaigne?
The answer is that one does not get to join “The Band” (as Robert Browning, in his poem about Childe Roland, calls those “knights who to the Dark Tower’s search addressed / Their steps”). Only other people whose names one may never know are permitted to grant one membership, based on one’s audition tape. So one might get to join “The Band” after all, but it’s out of one’s control, besides the fact that it’s totally within one’s control to render one’s audition tape unignorable.
Is what I just said true? I could answer: Only time will tell. But I prefer instead to say: No, for the human species is sublime, and nothing to them is not ignorable. They’ll find a way; I believe in their superpower.
*
Here I place an asterisk to signify that I’m starting this entry over. Scratch that beginning; I don’t like it. I wanna write a simple entry today, about simple things, and not negative or fatalistic in any way or razzle-dazzly.
*
I like this habit I’ve formed, of waking up in the morning without any plan and just writing down whatever is on my mind. Cuz it shows how utterly blank a spirit can be. I swear, the first thing I think of, after botching the start of this blog post by complaining of my present lack of prestige, is the ancient dinosaurs. When I was very little, I recall thinking a lot about dinosaurs... also planets — the distant past and outer space in general — and now that I’m no longer very little but just normally little, I think about the exact same things. The distant past and the outermost spaces. Time and distance. So: where I’m at is here and now, and what I prefer to think about is anything other than that: as far away as I can get from the here and the now: in other words, the Sauriod Age (long, long ago) and the alien expanse (far, far away). You could say that I value strangeness, unfamiliarity…
If you gather your family together around the radio and tune into the news channel, and listen to what is being said, and then discuss what you heard over dinner; or simply switch on the boob tube and watch some quality programming from the comfort of your sofa, all alone (because you are a single man: a bachelor) while eating a TV dinner on a TV tray; you will notice that everyone on the radio and television is singing the same old song, whose lyrics go “Everyone is going to die soon / the human race is hastening toward extinction.” And additional verses in this song prophesy that all of the animals shall die along with us — all other mammals, birds, and even the pretty insects — thus the viewer of the song is left with a feeling of despair. But I myself do not despair: I say that we had a good run, we living creatures. We did a lot of fun things in this world, we humans and our animal-insect brethren; it’s OK to call it a night. Some people cry “No, Bry! the show must go on!” but I put my arm around these folks and pat them on the back, in a friendly fashion, because I know better.
Now the aspect that I want to emphasize about the above situation is this: When we, the family of Every Thing that Lives (note that I do not call us a “Band”, as we have not yet engaged artistically in a collective pursuit; rather, everything we’ve embarked upon hereto has been suffused with the angst of competition), I say, when all of us Animate Beings sit down as a Family at the great Dinner Table of Nature to hash out the Fireside Chat (the above-mentioned Radio Program that we listened to), which told us that all of us are doomed, one of the Squirrels sitting in the Squirrel Section (all the different types of creatures in the world are seated before their respective place cards; incidentally, this Squirrel happens to be the one that lives in the nest in the tree in my own backyard), delivers the following speech:
“I think about the dinosaurs a lot, sitting in my nest up high in our tree, and I also think about outer space, and all the planets, and the alien forms of life that I assume inhabit such regions…”
“Please come to the point,” the President of Life interrupts.
So basically the squirrel rambles on about how the dinosaurs once existed, and how they were king-sized reptiles, “which was a race almost exactly similar to the squirrel race”, yet then they (the sauroids) went extinct. However, this was not so bad for them, because their memory lived on — and the proof of this is that we’re still talking about dinosaurs to this day: “in fact, I’m mentioning them this instant, in this speech, and I’m a Squirrel who has managed to master the timeworn and honorable language known as United Statesian; therefore if ancient dinosaurs can die out and still be slandered by their present-day successors, then I’m sure that we rodents and birds and bugs and menfolk will get discovered by whatever strange new creatures colonize this planet after we’ve all kicked the bucket. And they’ll build their homes atop our graves, and inherit the earth just fine. And they’ll guess what our purpose was, and instead of calling us Squirrels they’ll have their own name for us. Maybe they’ll find our bones and mis-connect them, when they glue together our skeletons to display in their museums. I’m not trying to excite you sexually, by envisioning this afterlife for us; I only mean to note that becoming a fiction in the minds of some pirate species from the future is a half-decent outcome. Cuz when you’re still alive, you gotta make up the story yourself: you must set the stage and label all your predecessors; like triceratops, brontosaurus, and my personal favorite: the holy pterodactyl (who I believe was the first Flying Squirrel); and then you’ve gotta dream up all sorts of dilemmas for them to go thru, in the episodes of their sitcom. — However, when YOU become the extinct class, you get to just sit back and relax and be the Source Material for some upcoming table of writers. Maybe they’ll ALL be Shakespeares, and we’ll ALL get to be Hamlet, so we’ll ALL get to annihilate everyone important in our environment, including ourselves, at the end of our show. And if the script is outlandish enough, maybe our actual ghosts, which aforetime we gave up so gladly, will change their minds about remaining dead and now decide that they wish to perform the roles in this new production, instead of being reborn in the accustomed recurrence. I myself wouldn’t stay in heaven, with Jehovah and Jesus, if they gave me the opportunity to play myself in a weird movie written by extraterrestrials. Cuz in heaven all the saints just sing the same sad song, all day long, and praise the Big Fascist (‘We’re all dead now. Thank God! All together now...’), that giant face with its open mouth that keeps urging us to enter. — I’m no fan of the traditional heaven. I will not hop forth and recline within our godhead’s jaws and let it swallow me again.
The throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him: and they shall see its vast face; and many lives shall be inside its forehead. (Rev. 22:3-4)
“No, this time I’m holding out for the Foreign Deity,” said the old grey Squirrel.
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