We All Are Vengeful Visitors, We All Are Frightened Animals
There's a profound sense of being in two places at once, dwelling in a cool, dim, quietly humming box where time moves at an imperceptible crawl, while tremendous forces howl past outside, dynamic, grey, blinding. That's how I spent my day. The air conditioner murmured. My three coworkers sleepily propped up a monotone triangle of rumored "severe storms after 2:00" while our clock stood still at 2:41, its batteries dead for the last three months. The clouds flew wildly past outside the window, dark and tattered, swift and heavy, mercurial and ominous, not slowing, not stopping, not doing anything at all. I spent the whole day trying to unravel a single problem, dawning with a bright and promising solution and swiftly descending through doubt, into complication, and final into total confusion. I had been confident enough at the outset to draw a cartoon bomb and a big red box plus arrow around the offending procedure in the flowchart I had spent two hours drawing up on the marker board the day before. By the end of the day, the cartoon bomb still was there, but had dumbly failed to explode. Perhaps it was a dud.
"Being paid to do nothing sounds really cool in principle, but when you actually do it, you realize it totally sucks. And that's why I'm going home."
The promised storms didn't precipitate until well after 7:00.
I let myself be rained out of training in the yard. In the past I wouldn't, but such rigid schedules are hard to maintain and hard to like. We cannot make time stand still, or every day look alike, no matter what our calendars or our chronometers say. I don't mind the variation. My legs are tired anyway.
Speaking of cartoons and bombs, lately I keep thinking of a short comic that I drew just under four years ago. I made numerous copies of it, sized to the exact dimensions of Jack Chick's notorious gospel tracts, except that the content of mine was considerably less inflammatory, and considerably less religious. All in all, I produced and distributed over 200. (Really! I made them in lots of twenty and kept a tally!) Some time ago, I forget exactly when, I destroyed my original drawings and all copies in my possession during a an asynchronous, and oddly uncharacteristic (for me) purge of things past. I say uncharacteristic because it is usually a tremendous challenge for me to get rid of things because I have a persistent perception of usefulness or value in almost anything, which leads me to hang onto some of the damnest, most useless odds and ends. (Though I've since reigned in this habit somewhat.) I don't know why I think of it so often lately, except that it strikes me as a time in my life that strikes my senses in a way that is radically different than now. At the same time, the two don't seem separate; it's not as if I'm looking into the past at something lost and irretrievable. It feels like remembering a vivid dream of a place you think you've never been to, but aren't really sure about.
In one of the closing essays in the last book that I read, the author attempted to divide human history into three periods of development, corresponding approximately to the development of art (the individual power), the development of the humanities (the power to orchestrate and control societies), and the development of science, technology, and with them, heavy industry (the power over the natural world). I think of this when I look back on my little comic, and I'm not sure how to feel. Is is buried? Is it subsumed? Was it the crude scribbling of some undeveloped, savage mind, or the pure cognition of some innocent inhabitant of a vanished Eden? (It should be said that I am not an especially talented or skilled illustrator, but that I can draw in such a way as to hide this fact from the viewer.) I know that it made a pert and easy expression of myself; "look, I did this." People seemed to think it was cute and charming. These days, my outputs are alien concepts, unreadable notations, and mechanistic constructions. You may say what you will about them, but those are things that are certainly not cute or charming. I've gone through my own revolution and become oddly industrious as a result. But the wheels are still turning, and something remains to be done. What it is, I do not know.
"I love these brand new days where the world is run by complicated, destructive powers that poison us, imprison us, and change the world in ways we can't control."
"I miss the good old days when your food gave you worms, there was no escape from the elements, and rape and murder were the only social protocols."
Tonight, I happened to see an image on the evening news that really startled me. Deep in the Amazon rainforest, a pair of war-painted archers aimed their hand-made weapons at a strange flying machine high above, and the inhuman eye of glass and circuits that looked down on them. It flashed by so quickly. But it left a deep impression on me. It was a powerful, and deeply poignant. A pair of human beings, just like us, just different from us, raising their crude and clumsy implements, fierce, helpless, perplexed, certain against an unknown menace leering down from the unreachable heavens. Our powers are greater. Our tools are much advanced. But still, we gaze out at those great powers, at the fearful void of the unknown, and rage against them with our primitive, clumsy artifacts of flimsy human power. The void of outer space. The void of the sprawling skies. The voids in our minds, our hearts, our souls. We shake our fists, and shoot our arrows, hope that the thing will just go away.
"Leave us our peace and simplicity."
Like Gilgamesh weeping over the grave of his companion. "Why must we die?"
Even a universe divided into phases of life and death is too complex.
The clouds float by, and you can feel their weight -- half a million tons in some -- pressing down. Their slightest motions shake the trees, their striding footprints spread in ever-expanding waves, out across the grassy fields and dusty lots.
"Severe storms after 2:00!"
"When can I go home?"
"Being paid to do nothing sounds really cool in principle, but when you actually do it, you realize it totally sucks. And that's why I'm going home."
The promised storms didn't precipitate until well after 7:00.
I let myself be rained out of training in the yard. In the past I wouldn't, but such rigid schedules are hard to maintain and hard to like. We cannot make time stand still, or every day look alike, no matter what our calendars or our chronometers say. I don't mind the variation. My legs are tired anyway.
Speaking of cartoons and bombs, lately I keep thinking of a short comic that I drew just under four years ago. I made numerous copies of it, sized to the exact dimensions of Jack Chick's notorious gospel tracts, except that the content of mine was considerably less inflammatory, and considerably less religious. All in all, I produced and distributed over 200. (Really! I made them in lots of twenty and kept a tally!) Some time ago, I forget exactly when, I destroyed my original drawings and all copies in my possession during a an asynchronous, and oddly uncharacteristic (for me) purge of things past. I say uncharacteristic because it is usually a tremendous challenge for me to get rid of things because I have a persistent perception of usefulness or value in almost anything, which leads me to hang onto some of the damnest, most useless odds and ends. (Though I've since reigned in this habit somewhat.) I don't know why I think of it so often lately, except that it strikes me as a time in my life that strikes my senses in a way that is radically different than now. At the same time, the two don't seem separate; it's not as if I'm looking into the past at something lost and irretrievable. It feels like remembering a vivid dream of a place you think you've never been to, but aren't really sure about.
In one of the closing essays in the last book that I read, the author attempted to divide human history into three periods of development, corresponding approximately to the development of art (the individual power), the development of the humanities (the power to orchestrate and control societies), and the development of science, technology, and with them, heavy industry (the power over the natural world). I think of this when I look back on my little comic, and I'm not sure how to feel. Is is buried? Is it subsumed? Was it the crude scribbling of some undeveloped, savage mind, or the pure cognition of some innocent inhabitant of a vanished Eden? (It should be said that I am not an especially talented or skilled illustrator, but that I can draw in such a way as to hide this fact from the viewer.) I know that it made a pert and easy expression of myself; "look, I did this." People seemed to think it was cute and charming. These days, my outputs are alien concepts, unreadable notations, and mechanistic constructions. You may say what you will about them, but those are things that are certainly not cute or charming. I've gone through my own revolution and become oddly industrious as a result. But the wheels are still turning, and something remains to be done. What it is, I do not know.
"I love these brand new days where the world is run by complicated, destructive powers that poison us, imprison us, and change the world in ways we can't control."
"I miss the good old days when your food gave you worms, there was no escape from the elements, and rape and murder were the only social protocols."
Tonight, I happened to see an image on the evening news that really startled me. Deep in the Amazon rainforest, a pair of war-painted archers aimed their hand-made weapons at a strange flying machine high above, and the inhuman eye of glass and circuits that looked down on them. It flashed by so quickly. But it left a deep impression on me. It was a powerful, and deeply poignant. A pair of human beings, just like us, just different from us, raising their crude and clumsy implements, fierce, helpless, perplexed, certain against an unknown menace leering down from the unreachable heavens. Our powers are greater. Our tools are much advanced. But still, we gaze out at those great powers, at the fearful void of the unknown, and rage against them with our primitive, clumsy artifacts of flimsy human power. The void of outer space. The void of the sprawling skies. The voids in our minds, our hearts, our souls. We shake our fists, and shoot our arrows, hope that the thing will just go away.
"Leave us our peace and simplicity."
Like Gilgamesh weeping over the grave of his companion. "Why must we die?"
Even a universe divided into phases of life and death is too complex.
The clouds float by, and you can feel their weight -- half a million tons in some -- pressing down. Their slightest motions shake the trees, their striding footprints spread in ever-expanding waves, out across the grassy fields and dusty lots.
"Severe storms after 2:00!"
"When can I go home?"