The search for something to be glad about

[Still testing markers to see if they have any juice. Sometimes the result's passable enough to serve as a blog post's obligatory image.]

P.S.

I just wanna add a postscript at the start here, to note that this entry ends with a reference to that scene from the film Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) where the father sprays his son with a hose while telling him repeatedly "Quit your moody brooding." Also I employ the word "drizz" as short for "drizzle", which I intend to have the same meaning as "mizzle".

Dear diary,

Will the birds ever tire of celebrating the rise of the sun? And will I ever tire of complaining about it? The answer, in my case, is NO: I enjoy this ritual; I like when there’s a template for action, so I can expend energy without having to do all sorts of reasoning. It’s like a dance that one has memorized. The atmosphere begins to lighten, and the birds guess what’s coming: the hint of the possibility of a new day, with all its brightness and worms, happifies them so intensely that they burst into spontaneous yodeling. Can you imagine if there were anything that could make mankind that glad?

Every day when the sun threatens to appear, I roll my eyes and say “Not again.” I groan at the thot. I guess if we could find a fresh, new, habitable planet like Earth, somewhere out there in the universe, that has clean water and clean air but no humans yet: THEN we astronauts might celebrate like the birds do. We might dance a jig. Maybe try to remember how to do the Charleston, where you twist your feet to the rhythm in a lazy sort of way. At some point I think you kick up your heels. And the arms swing forward and backwards. (Styling varies.) But we’d definitely hop up and high-five each other: we of the crew on the spaceship that found Earth Two, on the day that we located it.

So I guess I’m saying that the birdy parallel of daybreak in humans is planetbreak. The way that a songbird uses up a day and then feels guilty, cuz it blames itself for sponging all the sunlight and slurping all the worms, is the equivalent of humankind exploiting its own habitat and making everything toxic; then when the sun rises, the birds are like “Hallelujah!” just as when the New Pequod discovers Earth Two, we humans warble all sorts of trills and chirrups.

But why Earth Two? Maybe it’s Earth Nine or greater. Who knows how many times we’ve done this. We can’t remember where we came from, so we make up tall tales about a man named God creating us. But even if Science Itself proves that we devolved from the Sasquatch species, that still doesn’t answer where the Proto Sasquatches came from. Surely they arrived on their own gas-powered rocket from Earth Negative X, and if we could figure out the exact value of that last variable, we’d truly be somewhere: for then we’d know what our most distant parents looked like.

Yet it’s kinda scary to imagine meeting the pre-Sasquatch Lilith, cuz if everything came from her, and she had no beginning, then how could she have an end? It’s unthinkable either way: she either is beginningless and endless, or she’s dead now and cannot even stand up for herself. Maybe she’s a robot or a computer like that damsel from Metropolis (1927); some sort of cyborg, at least. What I mean is that maybe she’s not quite alive or dead: she put herself together somehow, then she tripped over her own power-cord and got unplugged, and then her solar panels fell asleep so that her batteries ran out, and now she’s waiting to get recharged or put back together again like Humpty Dumpty. And once her last wire is re-connected, she’ll spring back to “life”, as good as new. Perhaps, in lieu of emotionally rejoicing, she’ll even beep out a simple melody, pre-programmed by her own intuition, from the plinky speaker on her motherboard — something simple, like “Hot Cross Buns” or that famous song “Popcorn”.

My point is to try to dream up a brand of being that would react as shruggingly to our good news as we react to the avians’ gospel. The only news that could excite humankind — the discovery of a replacement satellite, readymade for us and parked in space afloat — for an alien species to remain as unmoved by this miraculous boon as mankind is by the dawn each day. The Android Sasquatches are so accustomed to hopping from planet to planet, exploiting the resources, squeezing each globe dry like an orange, and then leaving without paying their bill, that when they arrive at Earth Ninety Quintillion, they’re just as unimpressed as I am among the birds who spaz every morning.

Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.

We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,
We found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak.

[—from “Song of Myself” §25 by Walt Whitman]

Maybe some of us are more truly creatures of the dayend, beings of the nightbreak. Maybe it’s as simple as that. The birds love the sun, so they cheer when it’s born; whereas vampires loathe sunlight, so we smirk when the sun expires.

The trouble with generalising about humans is that we’re all so different. Some humans do indeed claim to like the sun. Those humans are for the birds. Others are smart and honest, like myself; so, just, as anyone who has attained a doctorate is called “doctor”, I give us sun-despisers the title “vampire”; because we vamp our energy from the dead, by way of books — classic literature and poetry — we labor while the sunny-folks are sleeping, and vice versa. Being poets, we work the night shift. (Our kingdom is dreamland; we are not of this world.) All our hope is in the possibilities of the mind: the part of our being that the tyrant Reason can’t wholly control, and which we have some part in.

I’m curious to know how much of THE THUNDER we make up; that is to say: how much of it consists of us. Yet it’s probably best that this remains a riddle, because we’d probably despair if we knew the harsh truth: we’d look at the X-ray image and cry, “Ay me! still only the skull is half-empty?” And Lilith the Android would correct us, with her customary optimism: “You mean half-full. But let us rejoice, for this is the godhead.” And, admittedly, she has a point — I’d rather add sparks to the slowly warming embers of that frozen fire than contribute to an iron god-leg or the LORD’s clay hoof…

‘The Messiah’s Dream’
by Daniel the Prophet

This secret is not revealed to me for any wisdom that I have more than any living, but for their sakes that shall make known the interpretation to the Messiah, and that thou mightest know the thoughts of thy heart.

Thou, O Messiah, dreamt and beheld an infinite image. This vast image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible.

This image’s head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, his legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay.

Thou sawest till that a meteor came down from the outer darkness and smote the image upon his feet that were iron-clay hybrids, and it brake them to pieces.

Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshingfloors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the meteor that smote the image became a great mountain, a supervolcano: and it filled the whole earth.

(Daniel 2:30-35)

What the prophet’s saying here is that humans are clay, which mixes with iron to make the cyborg pre-Sasquatch Lilith, the Self-originate Mother: Dimensional Manifestation and Consort of the Everlasting Mind. But this Lilith keeps being arrived at and arrived at. It’s the highest point on the staircase of being, which is at once the first step on the next staircase of the New Being that keeps expanding onward and outward.

So the flesh-iron hybrid serves as a plinth or pedestal; and then as we work our way up the physique of THE THUNDER, we arrive at its head. This was that skull that we looked at before, in the X-ray painting. We humans who are vampires, despite our being part of the clay flesh that mostly makes up the sole of God’s foot, actually contribute to the fiery thots that fill the deific brain and serve as the Imagination that Liveth Forever. I say this is something to be proud of. This is worth chorusing over. So keep your own head up and stop your moody brooding, or I’ll drizz you with this garden hose.