#347

The day was dark. The day was hardly day.

Forgestic Henry, with no more to say,

gloomed at his big front window,

& saucy lawn with gentians hard to see

and brooded on his almost endless destiny

with a birthday to come O.

Hankered he less for youth than for more time

to adjust the conflicting evidence, the ‘I’m—

immortal-&-not’ routine,

Pascal, Spinoza, & Augústine,

Kafka & all his tribe, living it out alone,

Mary Baker Eddy’s telephone

in her vault with a direct line to the Monitor:

it ain’t rung yet, pal, nor has Christ returned,

according to the World Almanac

which I read less for what it say than for

what’s missing: the editor of the Atlantic burned,

for instance, & Christ came back.

Birthdays will sometimes trigger an outburst of life & death soul searching: When will I die? Why do I have to die? (I’m so lovable.) What happens next, then? How do I prepare? Was my life worth it? In the end, it’s all totally unknowable, and Mary Baker Eddy, vaulted in her fine and private place, may have a direct line to the offices of the newspaper she started, but the editors are still waiting on that call. We’re all pretty sure it ain’t coming. Henry doesn’t think so at any rate, and the great philosophers, whose work he is well-versed in, haven’t been much help in telling him why. But there are worlds of ways to understand the world, and Henry’s take, for all his erudition, might just be limited by too much faith in erudition. I talked for a long time to a woman a bit over a year ago who had an interesting vision of all of this. She is a reiki master and a firm believer in reincarnation for humans and animals, and lots more out-there beliefs that I only barely scratched the surface of. My tolerance for paranormal story-telling is pretty high just because I love the stories, and this woman delivered. I didn’t judge, because who am I to judge?, but she had some great ones, especially about all the local hurt, sick and suffering animals when word got out about her empathy and understanding of their lives and the cycles of birth and death their souls (and ours) are all enmeshed in. We’re talking hawks, owls, raccoons, foxes, rabbits, opossums, et al., all of them sick or hurt, who were showing up in droves up on her doorstep asking to be killed so they could be released into the next cycle of incarnation, and she helped them along for awhile out of mercy and compassion. But it got so busy that she had to send a psychic message out to the local fauna that she wasn’t able to keep up and please, don’t be looking to her for help in dying because it was getting to be more than should be reasonably expected of one person. The animals got the message and have backed off. Unless she is some kind of consummate actress and had me utterly fooled, she was totally serious. And it is a great story, whether or not it’s poppycock. Her compassion for road-kill deer and things like that is consequently non-existent: They knew what they were doing. They’ll be fine. Sure, animals suffer too, and they know fear, but they also don’t have the sentimental and stupid attachment to this life that we do because their understanding of how it all works is so much more sophisticated and aware than ours. Her story hints that we have these bullshit egos that put us like six-billion separate little tin-pot emperors each at the center of all and everything. Animals don’t have to deal with such nonsense. They’re actually existing as part of a genuine community, seamlessly conjoined components of an existential totality that stretches across space and time, and across life and death. And while my culture has no real conception of such an idea outside of the odd hippie reiki-master/animal-empath you’ll find here and there, there almost certainly have been human cultures who saw themselves existing in a similar existential framework. I read a fantastic book—whether poppycock or not, again, I’m not judging—written by a group of “expert” dousers in England (self-published) who claim that they can detect magnetic energy waves left by minute mineral traces in the soil, and from this these experts can reconstruct historical events. Their theoretical and scientific rationale is complicated. But their reconstruction of pre-Roman and Roman-ruled Britain makes for a fantastic, if horrible story. According to them, the Druids were a clerical upper class, very mystical, who were tolerated and even encouraged by the Britains over whom they ruled. The Romans, once they arrived in force, found the Druids to be a threat, and so engaged in an organized campaign of ruthless genocide against the Druids, pretty much wiping them out and for all practical purposes erasing knowledge of them from historical record. The dousers feel they know of this genocide because near almost all of the stone circles that dot Britain and Ireland—which according to them were Druid temples but also machines that manipulated magnetic Earth energies—they can detect traces of Druid blood in the soil left there in regular lines by ritual mass executions. The point is that the Druids actually went to this peacefully as often as not, lining up in an orderly fashion to have their heads cut off one-by-one by the Romans because to a Druid, the line between life here and now, and the afterworld or underworld with which they were in daily contact, was a fairly trivial matter. Sure, kill me. Whatever. This is mere politics. I’ll be back tomorrow. That’s sort of the attitude.

I’ve tried telling this story to friends and it never gets very far before I start getting odd looks. I totally understand. What my friends don’t seem to get, though, is that I couldn’t care less if the story is true or not! It’s a great story, that’s what matters. Simply because any story arises from a human imagination, it can tell us something important if we permit ourselves to listen properly, which is to say, in suspension of judgment. I roll my eyes often enough at B.’s narcissistic self-centered ego, something I think we all recognize to varying degrees in ourselves. But, jeez, he had such a narcissistic self-centered ego! That’s okay. Whatever. But in his meditations on his own demise, roaring down on him like the alcoholic A-train, which he’s trying to hold off by throwing poems at it, splatting against the windshield of the locomotive like so many tomatoes (and with about the same effectiveness you’d expect of tomatoes against a real locomotive), his explorations aren’t opening up his understanding as far as they might. They’re a-Christian Western orthodox, and when you take life and death from a Western standpoint and strip Christian dogma from it, you don’t have all that much left, which is exactly what B. realizes. It’s the basis of his existential predicament, and with that it’s easy to place him in the camp with Sartre and Camus, who were engaged in something similar. This was his zeitgeist and theirs. B. read the papers and heard nothing but a roaring silence, an existential tinnitus whining in his ears. The papers and almanacs offered zilch. Kafka, Spinoza and that whole tribe? Same thing again. Zilch. Berryman might have learned more teaching himself to talk to the animals.