Unwashed Hand of the Powerless God

Jul 28, 2008 13:01

Somehow, I remember these details: one or two days a year, walking over the grass on Peace Park will feel and sound like walking on bubble wrap, because that is when the lantern trees drop their seed pods; green june bugs have unusually wide and varying flight paths compared to most beetles, and like to burrow into the shallow substrata of mowed lawns; what a sudden change in air pressure feels like; fireflies congregate near water; light is always brighter on hot days; the wind only blows from the East when the weather is changing; where to go to get a clear view of the sky; where all the roads to nowhere are.

Especially that last one.

Out on the frontiers of concrete organization, where the pioneer weeds bristle up from the desolated red clay and the barren rocks, where the signs stand for no one to see and the lights shine to illuminate things that do not yet exist, where the traffic signals are dark and blinded under plastic, where streets having nothing on them but names, (spoken, like everything else, into being) where the earth is heaped up just to get it out of the way. These are places you can just go. These are places you can just stop. These are moments taken from a motion that is not continuous, that happens in fits and starts, on weekdays in the milder seasons of the year, and then only during normal working hours. These are places you can go because they're not yet moving, and these are places you can stop because, being in motion, no one can call you a loiterer or a trespasser.

That is where I ended up, sitting on the hood of the car, watching lightning explode in the towering clouds, so bright I could see it even when I shut my eyes.

Before that I went out to do nothing particular but deviated suddenly from course when I saw something ten miles high, weighing millions of tons and discharging hundreds of millions of volts of electrical potential every second, passing just to the North. It blistered with its own rage, fiery, then ghostly as the sun went down and its overreaching expanse overshadowed two or three counties. I couldn't contain my curiosity. I drove north, to a dead-end road that overlooks a good twenty or thirty miles and watched it come in. I went home. Gale torn shreds of cloud flew by, only a few hundred feet of the ground, ghostly in the city lights. The trees bent down and hid their faces. I went back out.

It was like every really terrifying dream I've ever had. I suppose that's why I couldn't resist. Into a wild, turbulent darkness, and beyond that, wild, turbulent darkness, inescapably deep, unimaginably vast, unspeakably powerful. It's difficult to appreciate how huge a thunderstorm is until its upon you, and only then if you are willing to look up into it. There's a reason that everything bends down in the wind to hide when things go black. The sky had erupted into unknowable violence; the warring forces had made their own electric light; the air shook and shuddered with the motions of thing too huge for any human field of vision, too monstrous for either simple light or simple darkness. And there was only the sound of the tractor trailers wailing out from beneath the night-blackened portent, and only the light of the fierce inequalities made and unmade in the relentless chaos overhead.

I stayed there until the rain came down so hard I couldn't see anymore. And then I stayed for a few minutes longer.

Somehow, I was completely dry by the time I got home.

Things happen lately and I hesitate to describe them, but I do it anyway. I watched a pigeon die. It flopped painfully about on the sidewalk, half-lifting off, half-falling back to earth, trailing blood on the pavement. It ended up at my feet. I just stood there and looked down at it for a minute or two. A man with a scraggly beard and a child stood there and looked at me looking at the pigeon. The man with the beard was half-talking to me and half to the child, trying to convince one or the other of us that the bird "had a concussion" or would "come to its senses" and how he had seen it come down when "some kids hit it with a metal pipe" because, he claimed, "they were scared" and this was all such transparent bullshit it was like I didn't even hear it. I just looked down at the poor painful thing shedding feathers on the ground. Then I picked the wounded pigeon carefully up and looked steadily at it for a minute more. It shuddered in my hands, and the blood ran down my fingers. "Well what are you going to do now?" the man with the beard said, but instead of waiting for a reply from me he just kept conversing with himself. "You could take it to the raptor rehabilitation program" (a real irony here; hawks eat pigeons) "but it's not a raptor; I guess you could try Second Chance [an animal shelter], or ... " The child stood by dumb and wide-eyed. I just held the pigeon up and looked at it. Then I looked at the man with the beard and the child and quietly said, "He's going to die." The man with the beard started saying something else. I gently said, "It happens to all of us. It's okay." Then I walked away with the pigeon into the alleyway. I sat with the pigeon for a while. It dragged itself languorously over the pavement, its face on the ground, its wings hunched tensely up and quivering. It flailed against the wall, slammed itself clumsily up against a small iron gate and beat its wings painfully against the ground. Then it stumbled up to me. It suddenly stood upright on its feet, took a few steps in a half-circle around me, then laid down, closed its eyes and stopped moving. It shuddered a little bit and then the body went stiff.

Then I went and washed my hands.

Life is like that; we have so much pain that we don't know what to do with it. Then one day we just stop moving, and there is nothing anyone can really say.

Much after the fact, I thought to myself, "Here I am, many times more massive than this little creature; I could crush it, I could break its neck, I could outsmart it with a trap, I could eat it alive, but if I wanted to save its life I would be utterly powerless."

A few days before I had tried to catch a sparrow trapped in a stairwell, so that I could put it outside. I could just barely reach the place where it was flailing itself against the huge exterior windows through the bars in the stair railing. In fact, the fit was so tight I had to use my left arm, which is apparently ever-so-slightly smaller around than my right, but only just enough to get me a centimeter or two more of reach. The little bird chirped and fluttered in terror and I kept thinking, "This is exactly the same thing I would be doing if I were trying to catch it to eat it." And as far as the bird was concerned, it was all the same.

I am strangely intrigued at how, initially, acts of kindness and compassion bear a very striking outward resemblance to acts of violence, cruelty or selfishness.

Much in the same way that, as is well known from embryology, the very early stages of growth in vertebrate embryos from even very different orders are virtually indistinguishable, i.e. a reptile embryo looks almost exactly like a mammal embryo. The world is full of interesting parallels.

Then I went and talked to Dr. K about how to succeed (if at all) in the science game. It felt like an eerie parallel to this time of year, when all the young birds come down from the nests to try their hand in life, and a great many of them end up stiff, broken bodies lying in the sun and covered with flies.

I have this strange sensation of cleaning a house that I didn't even know I lived in. It's furnished with sounds and colors and thoughts and everything imaginable, and as I come into contact with these things moment by moment, day by day, I pick them up, look them over and say, "No, I don't need this," or "Hey, this isn't mine," and then I quietly put it out somewhere away. I even feel weirdly untroubled by my own worries and my own petty human sorrows (because let's be honest -- humans are sad about things that are almost always inevitable). I still have them of course. And I don't feel outside myself. It's only that I look down on it, like some strange, massive wingless thing, or some boiling black conflict in the sky; I hover over myself, rest one great hand gently on it and, in my strange unintelligible language of English and thunder and lightning, say, "It's okay, it happens to all of us. It's okay."
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