A Shift In The Air

This is my amble, the preamble of my amble. Let it shatter into pieces of hindsight. I will reassemble it as an airport. The sky is pink and friendly. That’s where I want to be. Up there. Shaking hands with the sun.

This is the robin that I intended to put in the first paragraph. This is the table that I intended to write this on. This is the water that I intended to boil for coffee. This is how I felt before I said this and these are the words that I was going to use to say it.

Thanks to its anonymity, Bohemia remains erratic and puzzling. But is it? Is it anonymous? Because I just said its name. What does anonymous mean? It means seeing a landscape through a tangle of blackberry vines.

The room is among itself in words of clay. They crumble apart easily, thus allowing our mouths to move. Being has flavor because the world is everywhere around us. We sit beside the knowledge of ourselves in sanguine mutation, waiting for an expansion, a strain of music to pluck our nerves into ideas of ourselves. There are essences but no simple way to get at those essences.

If you want a look at Bohemia, follow the deer to the end of the road. There are winds pushing us toward abstraction. But don’t worry. We won’t lose our way. The handsprings have deformed the eggnog. It now tastes of shadows and paper.

Abstraction is wax. Descartes knew that the wax was wax. He just wasn’t sure how he knew the wax was wax. Wax is wax because it had an infinite capacity for changing shape. I don’t know why that bugged him so much. Me, I go for those scented candles. Light one up and get the room nice and fragrant. Is that a problem? I see no division between the mind and the body.

The human brain weighs three pounds, roughly. How much does a thought weigh? Does it depend on the thought? The brain of a sperm whale weighs (roughly) seventeen pounds. I have thoughts about this. How much do my thoughts about this weigh? Seventeen pounds? Eighty-five pounds? Or nothing at all?

If you said nothing at all, you would be correct. None of my thoughts weigh anything. I nurture this sirloin with all my might. It might come in handy one day. As a pumpkin.

Or touch of cologne.

Sometimes I will feel the explosion of something huge in my being. I don’t know what it is. I like to use the word ineffable. This would be a good occasion in which to use the word ineffable. But I won’t say ineffable. One must be careful in giving names to things, especially feelings. Naming is a form of conjuration. It is how Prospero conjured storms. But it can backfire. Be careful. Conjuration is a tricky game. It can lead to camels, zombies, and seaweed.

Elevations are monstrosities of height smiling in halos of irrelevance.

Being is ineffable. Incalculable and incomprehensible. Thinking is the rhythm of being and its openness to mystery. It reveals itself at the very moment it withdraws. There is felt a draft. A ghostly presence. And then the great mystery is unearthed and the coffin opened and we see bones. Which answers nothing.  

A man pokes a pile of burning wood which releases a burst of sparks rising heavenward into the night. I imagine there were many scenes like this on the eve of great battles. Agincourt, the siege of Stirling Castle, the Battle of Hastings.

The artist is not an army but has the strength of an army. It’s because he has the secret of death in his arsenal. Sometimes it’s red and sometimes it’s yellow. It’s rarely green. Green is the soft power of hawthorn. This is what life does when death isn’t around. It seduces pain with the precision of an insect.

Being, according to Heidegger, is a play of appearance and concealment. Sometimes it’s helpful to put these things within a specific context.

Last night, for instance, the moon was waxing crescent. Humidity was at 86% with winds averaging 12 mph.

I entered the cave of the blue dragon. I heard the animal sleeping. There was an animal in me sleeping. All my fears awoke and walked around in my blood, poking around among my bones, grabbing organs and squeezing. This went on for some time. And then a great light shown from the walls of the cave and the cave itself disappeared.

Leaving behind an old trembling hand.

A sprig of sage in the window, a shift in the air just before it thunders.