The Twilight Zone

When you age, life does come to seem like a Twilight Zone episode. I can see Rod Serling off to the side making commentary: look where sits a lone man in a single room. A man surrounded by ghosts. A man nearing the end of his life, still seeking the grail of poetry, the epiphany to end all epiphanies. The drawer is overflowing with letters. Manuscripts. Submissions. Rejections. Proofs. There is no boundary that begins and ends at the human skull. A skull is just a skull. The stuff inside is amazing, but has its limits, until the limits dissolve, and the universe comes flooding in, and the division between the visible and the invisible dissolves as the golden light of the sun disappears and the first few stars appear in the sky. This is what we call The Twilight Zone.

They say the sun is a nuclear reactor fusing hydrogen atoms into helium. I have no reason to doubt that. But isn’t the sun also a star? An angel of heat and light?

Helicopters and mollusks pursue different objectives, but are otherwise ideas based on dispersal, the erection of beams, the pouring of cement. Men in yellow helmets whistling, signaling, waving. It’s a strange world, isn’t it? Who knows how any of us came to be here. We just come out on the stage and say what we have to say and then make our exits with whatever grace and fortitude we can muster when the inevitable arrives.

I was a mollusk once. I flew a helicopter. No arms, no legs, no skill. I flew it because I created a sentence that said I flew it. One minute you’re a mollusk, the next you’re an angel. It’s an endothermic change, a form of sublimation. Chemists use sublimation to purify a substance from its compounds. Poets use sublimation to volatilize the mundane into poetry and enjoy the luxury of detaching its energy from the impurities of a world obsessed with square footage and patio furniture.

It’s simply a matter of will. Whether will is an actuality or not doesn’t matter. If you believe you have will, you have will. You will will. You will it into being. Or at least a fiction, a credible proposition. You might not be able to save Planet Earth from an asteroid or abrupt climate change but you can change a lightbulb or bake some brownies. You surround it with a little narrative and voila! you’ve got the beginnings of a dialectic.

What is energy? Energy is a pile of dirt, fields of wheat rustling and waving in the hills of the Palouse. The landscape expands into buttes and canyons. And since the planet is a sphere, we pack our head with idle thoughts and plywood. With loops. And indirection. And life.

And like anything weird, life needs the endless treadmill of making a living.

Or not.

Making a living: what a strange phrase. As if life required a table saw and a hammer, a 60-volt drill and a bag of nails. All it really takes is a high-wire 1,000 feet above the ground and a T-shirt with a question mark. You’ll make lots of friends. There will be feasts and ceremonies. And somewhere in the background will be a man named Rod Serling standing aloof and crepuscular with a knowing look and a martini.