GRAND BLANC, MI-

How tired of thinking, how sawed off my seeing, how heard my hearing, how tasteless my tasting, how senseless my ability to smell, how unfeeling what I touch. Just the same, so easy to relearn how to think, see, hear, taste, smell, touch. It’s only a forced illusion, a child’s card trick. Yet this deception serves as a thicker pair of glasses, a re-tuned hearing aid and…an artificial brain, nose and tongue.

Rotate the crops, Kierkegaard wrote (laugh, but I have ethics; I keep the neighbors at bay and love them when they’re on the other side of the ocean). I may not believe in a god, but I know fear and trembling. They’re hobbies of sorts, the kind that irritate oneself for the want of something better to do. But if the crop is the imagination, yes, rotate it, a degree, 360 degrees, or some degree between.

Take a walk. Think like a biologist. Be Darwin now. It all looks different, operating within another system. It operates outside the influence of capitalism, or so inside that it’s back outside again, with the cans and plastic cups — NEVERTHELESS! — it can be done.

Take another walk. Walk on tiptoes, or pretend to do so if suffering a herniated disc. No, don’t walk on tiptoes: Danger, unless wearing a helmet. Forget toes. Rise within and see like a mountain. Whether resembling a mountain or not, a true mountain cannot see; the human has that advantage. But if the mountain could see, then its perspective would earn envy and imitation. For the human, it is different, but it can be faked, and that is enough and there is more.

Take a third walk. Walk and walk and walk. March. Keep going, walk, march. Run in front of cars. Yell racial epithets. Do it for a three years. Now a millionth the experience of a soldier is known. Once home, read Nausea; no, that title is cited only for its pointfullness. Read Camus. In America, Camus is famous, but in France, he bid a less than fond adieu. No need to worry that reading Camus will make one appear to be appearing to appear hip. Those days are gone, or these exercises need not be performed. Certain smells — YOU KNOW THE ONES! — remain new: Never mind the mind. It will come and it is coming but never mind that for now. Smell the smells, unless in Iraq. No one will care until the wall.

Take a hundred walks or a thousand drives. Look for weeds, crickets, cicadas (kill them on sight or sound), uppity birds, wait and wait, something is coming, like a hallucination but not quite that, something else. The mind will run beyond breathlessness, wildly or with grace, like horses. Watch out for artificial obstacles; men are always building them.

Ignore all hurdles. Jumping one only leads to the next, until retirement or a positive steroid test result. Forget retirement. Golf is a game of small, black holes amidst over-mowed lawns. Do not play games with life. This has nothing to do with life. This is about living. Let the servants worry about life; it’s half their job. Pay them more. See Karl Marx in the mirror. Scary!

If all of these suggestions should fail, beat the head against the keyboard. It will fail the goal, but, just in case one goes mute, the face will display the alphabet, and a few words may be spelled by contorting the face. Better to visit the zoo. Kneel backwards behind a donkey and wait for a kick in the head from an ass. Now go Dali on this gifted moment. In the zoo, notice the burning giraffes.

Feed the giraffes.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 8:35 am and is filed under Fear, Pets & Animals, Transcendence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.