The Endless Rapport Among Things

That night in the summer of 1968 I thought they’d come at last to save us, a perfect H formation a thousand feet or so over Puget Sound, nine bright dots, motionless in the night sky except for the twinkling. We’d been sitting in a bar where a blues band was playing as one by one people left their tables and went outside. I was really enjoying the music and didn’t want to go anywhere but my curiosity got the better of me and I went outside to see what everyone had gone to see and there they were, the H formation of little twinkly dots. Were they going to land? It was like waiting expectantly for a bus in the cold. I ran down to a small café to get to a pay phone. I had really long hair and was wearing a frock coat and a frilly Regency style shirt and black Beatle boots and jeans and called my dad and shouted into the phone to go outside. There are little twinkly lights hanging over Puget Sound in an H formation. Everyone stole a shy nervous look at me. My dad, an aerospace engineer, seemed less than enthralled. I went back to see if the dots had moved. Nope. Excitement yielded to drab reality. Probably a hoax. I returned to the blues.

We’re not just alive. We’re life. Life itself. So this fascination with extraterrestrials is a fascination with life and the multiple forms it can take. The whole idea of finding another form of life quickens the nerves. The monotony of human anatomy hungers for the stupefying phenomena of some new life form. Work is an inspiration to some people. For others it’s a deadening poison, an unnatural imposition. One thing everyone has in common is a hunger for anything different, especially if it’s weirdly different, like an igloo in the middle of Death Valley. Being can be wearying, like a manifesto on a paper towel. It’s something you hold onto for as long as you can, without entirely knowing why, or being fully invested in the irony of it. Some problems are never meant to be solved. The answers are too convulsive. Life prefers a nice clean sheet to a slab of marble. But when it comes to tentacles, there’s a familiar fascination, the pull of mystery. Tentacles are tantamount to theory. Is all life based on carbon? Or is some silicon-based? Those suction cups are so alien on the side of the glass. The eyes full of wonders. 

When I learned that a clock placed on the floor runs a little more slowly than one on a table, I put all my clocks on the floor. I find I can get a lot more done in the day now that the day has been extended by a few more hours. I haven’t done the calculations yet, but the world feels a whole lot different than it did before. It feels like there’s something in suspension. Maybe it’s time, time in suspension. It’s still moving, but much more slowly. It used to go fast as swallows. Now it hangs in the air like a D minor slowly unfolding an intrigue. I feel drawn, as always, to some future goal, even though I know there’s no goal, because if there was a goal I’d feel it. Goals monopolize a being. When there’s no goal, there’s no reason for a clock at all. Unless you like to keep track of the minutes dripping out of space like whole notes. A rhinoceros can stand under a tree for hours without making a sound. And it is this, rather than the speed of a Bugatti Chiron, that matters most about time. The stillness in the air. The endless rapport among things.