Fascination

Fascination with the pale grey softness of my cat’s ear with a bit of lamp light passing through the thin membrane. I wonder what Mick Jagger would’ve looked like if he’d gone bald. That woman I saw come out of Bartell drugs today while sitting in the car waiting for R, reading René Char, thirty-something I’m guessing, with long – and I mean long – black hair, black jacket, black pants, black boots. It seemed to be there wasn’t a single assumption you could make about her. She could’ve been libertarian, an avid Ayn Rand reader, or a doom rock aficionado with a heavy immersion in Black Sabbath or Earth or Sun O))). She could’ve been an ambassador from the planet Clafoutis or an interior decorator with a chichi Seattle firm. She could’ve been a zoologist with a medical degree and a pet boa at home. I have a feeling that if I were introduced I’d be stunned with what she was actually all about. Irritating that the paper napkin I use to protect the desk sticks to the bottom of my coffee mug. I watch a French documentary about Senegal, a group of women canoeing in the Saloum Delta arrive at a beach to dig for oysters, a mountain of oyster shells nearby, nearly as big as the one I once saw by the Ark restaurant in Nahcotta, Washington on the Long Beach peninsula. It’s almost been one year since we last ate at a restaurant, because of the pandemic. I listen to the Martian wind through NASA’s Perseverance rover’s sensors. It sounds remarkably like any wind I’ve heard on Earth. But it’s deceptive. It sounds like home but it’s not. At ground level the Martian atmosphere has a pressure of 6.518 millibars or 0.095 psi as compared to the Earth’s sea level atmosphere pressure of 14.7 psi. The “gear-ratio” for Mars is 226:1, meaning every kilogram of material you send requires a rocket to burn 225 kilograms of fuel.  It is often thus: the clenched fist seeks the anvil, even if it has to smash the wild lilies. Each one of us is sand filtering through the fingers of whatever hand brought us here. Cat on my lap, purring, she looks up at me and I gaze into her eyes, which are a glowing, iridescent green, more like jewels than eyes, and wonder, as her eyes shift about, what might be going through her mind, and what that mind be like, and what is a mind, exactly? That moment when you suddenly realize that the curious object you’re staring at in the bedroom mirror at the foot of the bed is your own head. Is there a limit to knowledge? Only if there’s a knowledge of limits. One thing I’d like to do before I die is watch how a Viking sword gets made. Visit the hot springs and lava fields of Iceland. The Viking World Museum in Njarðvík, Reykjanesbær. Step into the past. Egil Skallagrímsson, Viking skald, sorcerer, berserker, and farmer. Wonder what he grew. What can you grow in Iceland? Potatoes, turnips, rhubarb, carrots and cabbage. “There was a man named Ulf, the son of Bjalfi and of Halbera, the daughter of Ulf the Fearless.” So begins Egil’s Saga, which ends around the year 1,000.