Douglas Mercer
November 30 2024
Continued From Crow (Part Six)
The owl came to sit on my prowl, it was an odd kind bird, I assumed some sort of misfit. Eight inches from tip to tail it was brown covered in buff speckles with two whitish tips on the upper side. Any approach I made to him and it would fly away; he would fly to the mizzen tree and from a further vantage watch me carefully. Given the slipperiness of the location he was forced to cling with difficulty, its claw useless for the purpose; bedraggled, shivering from the cold, its eyes drooping in fatigue at the bitter effort; his feathers fluffed up in a weak provision again the brutal icy cold. His wings went up and down as if in preparation for the time he lost his grip so he could fly away. When a shift came in the dullness of the monolithic sky, a shaft of unaccustomed light, he did fly off as the horizon closed once more behind him. I had set sail and as I moved I regretted that I made it harder for him to return; but I could not slow up for the poor misfit, he would need to make it or not on his own, for I had my own clearance to make and a time table which was precise. The last I saw of him he was gamely sailing windward, and it touched my heart to see him going thus East, and not on the easy downward flight to South America. I knew then that he would not return. And I intuited that he and I were the victim of the same impulse; this was to return again and again to a state which never experienced any quarter and where one could ask for none, where one could only count on what came to one by chance. Out of our resources we struggle to delay or avoid the inevitable exhausted subsiding into the icy waters of death. Was he a weakling on an ill fated flight? Or the strongest of his kind setting off alone to see what lay beyond the vast dangerous wastes which the others feared and which his ancestors had warned him against? Was he an odd duck? Or the finest of his race? My understanding is that owls do not migrate, so perhaps he was just one who from some inexplicable inner compulsion unknown to himself went in search of new lands. Either way he was an unusual one, or a misfit, in all great likelihood fated like so many of his human counterparts to die alone and unmourned, unseen by any of his brood, for he had been willing to take that one chance in infinity to discover something truly new. A I pondered his coming and going I was reminded of a small pilot fish who suddenly darted into the face of twelve foot shark, and for a moment locked eyes with the monster, scuttling quickly away as it prepared to eat him. He was the only one of his species perhaps who knew for certain what the lifeless eyes of a shark looked like up close, although one might say that he was quite lucky to carry away the memory.
***
They say that one only knows how splendid the day is in the cool of the evening, but that is but a pause; how does one know then how splendid life is, for splendid surely it is. The fiercest calm you will every experience is the calm of this sea, and one look at it and you see it is a great place to sum up. When I arrived it looked for all the life of me like a resting place, a final resting place you might say, a serene graveyard in which to lay one’s head—but I had no intention of making it that. When my boat landed and you had asked me the means or the conveyance of escape I would have stuttered out nothing like an answer. But I see now that is only because so far in my life, and so far on this trip, it had been such a bitter struggle that I had no time to collect my thoughts. I would write things down of course but those were but fleeting ideas on the way to somewhere else. No for thought to take solid form one needs a clear calm expanse of see through water and world enough and time. One also needs to have given up on all temporary expedients, and any thoughts to the future, any thoughts of survival. That is it requires not a submission to what is, but an acceptance of it, or better yet to set it clearly, whatever your relation to it. Most of all one needs a serene sky above, cloudless and pure, and solitude, and a determination to make it on nothing but what one possesses most nearly, one’s own inner resources. And, I might add, an unfailing belief in logic. After I had got underway it was funny but I thought most of my younger compatriots—if compatriots they are—so committed to defying convention and committed to living in the world of imagination. But full of spirit and song though they most definitely are it takes no genius to see that their plans and aims will ineradicably come a cropper, go up in the apocalyptic smoke of a fiery fury of combustible joss sticks. They will take their hits and go on the roof and think themselves golden gods and jump in order to fly—eh, they will find out about the power of their imagination then mate. For if one cannot fly then one’s imagination is an act, meant for a bitter end. And so hopeless and disillusioned they will seek out the selfishness of their elders, and think it was all a dream. No, there is nothing that requires more iron discipline than to be an acolyte of the imagination, you don’t find it in plays or novels or films, that is for sure. As for my own cohort, the Hooray Harrys of the Empire and of its demise, they long ago left off any auguring of the Higher Dream, or play acting it, if they ever had it. But words alone are laws and the most basic one there is is that thought is free; but for it to be so one must not believe it with all one’ heart, but see it happen in one life and so make it so. Then the imagination does a lot more than take wing, one might say.
I was at the heart of the calm sea and having no thoughts of returning, of not needing to get back in line or of my reappearance, I could let my mind roam and think about disappearing. DIGGER RAMREZ I sent out as a final communication, suitably cryptic, let them ponder that one in my absence, the basilisk blokes: DIGGER RAMREZ LOG KAPUT. I wondered at the change that had come over me, I felt reserved and stern and ready for anything, so unlike my two other incarnations in life, the life of the party roaring boy, the boisterous devil may care bar room braggart filled with blarney and braggadocio and, alternately, the boffin like wan loner given to sulky fits in my solitary room. Indeed, more than anything it was like I was having a personality transplant, as if some purpose unknown was taking me over and using me for it aims. The first moment I could I downed a bottle of Moet and Chandon, given to me in the spirit of leaving; and I thought long and hard about what I knew I would write, and in the spirit of travesty I started out with a droll and lively warning for the goon squads, sending them up in advance:
My driveling nonsense is now on record forever. Unless you decide to unsee it by erasing it which I warn you will be a very grave mistake. Because such drivel of such astounding drivilaity has never before been reported, and most certainly never driveled, this is drivel to make all other drivel take a back seat, and such important drivel is incredibly hard to come by in these latter days or any other for that matter where the great paucity of drivel is noteworhty. I venture to suggest that in all the archives that have been ever archived there is no the slightest evidence of such drivel as I drivel at this lone moment. It is like the great nose of Cyrano de Bergerac, that other great ventriloquist. A monument of drivel, drivel like no other drivel, not mere drivel but drivel beyond comparison, the drivel of the ages, the drivel of epochs past and epochs yet to come, not plebian drivel but aristocratic and first class drivel, top drawer drivel, the prince of drivel, the emperor of drivel, the supreme and unexampled example of the driveller’s lost art. Don’t erase it. Don’t you dare. If you did it would be bad mistake. Keep it for posterity’s sake so that men unborn will laud you name as the protector and White Knight of all the forgotten driveller’s the world has ever known.
Was I a lonely depressed man groping for intellectual stimulation? No, most emphatically no. I started out by laying down a predicate which I called Axiom One of the Cosmic Integral:
Man = 0 – 0
Put in plain English this mathematical formula means that humankind, over the full course of its history, is a void of blank. If anything more fair or judicious has ever been communicated I for one have never heard it.
In midnight oil sessions I began to recall the India of my youth and drew some pretty gloomy predictions. In embryonic form I recalled my very first conception of God, gleaned no doubt from my parents and teachers. He (for it was always He then not It that I know It to be now) was an old man with gray beard who loved me but would punish me were I to be wicked. That computed with what I knew of the world for my father was likewise; then one day I saw a fruitcake on the table and I told my mother thank you for buying it but she said she had not; finally when I insisted she told me she hoped to deceive me as she had bought it for a surprise. That did not compute until I realized that it was alright to lie so long as it gave people pleasure. Soon after that a man was run over by a train, and the parts of his body were on either side of the track. No doubt he was trying to avoid the fare and God had punished him for it, but to my childish mind the justice seemed draconian. My brain became clogged with problems that it could not compute and I had to face problems that seemed to me at the time insoluble. For if God does not compute then there must be something wrong, some unsaid axiom must be present that has gone unexamined. Perhaps this bit about lying and about injustice said something deeper, perhaps God was not full of love but simply hostile or at least indifferent, though the idea that he did not exist seemed preposterous (that notion came later in my own preposterous adolescence). As more information was fed into my computer I began swiftly to go from point to point in rapid sequences: I concluded that there seemed to be no verifiable evidence that we could (or should!) expect any assistance from God. Man was evading his responsibilities by expecting (or even hoping!) for such help. This seemed to be a great leap forward and I so sweeping did it seem that I resolved to throw everything out of my computer that I had learned so far; for if we are lied to once why not a million times (or more!). I took stock of the certainties and found them wanting so I cleared them out first. Even being bereft and empty like this so exhilarated by the process was I that I concluded that if the mind could make such rapid advances there was no limit to its clearing capacity. For everything I had dreamt up so far was purely logical, and in secret I held up logic itself as my God and knew that alone would show me what was true provided I never abandoned of failed it.
I was back at the beginning of course, but one could begin in worse places. I had been born, I had lived, and was slated to die. That computed. Thus I was locked in a kind of prison or cruel joke where I had been left marooned, fed lies by others, but upon being disillusioned I became aware of the torture rack I lay upon. Was there a way out? Was there a way forward? Only by more thinking I presumed and set out about it.
I read these lines now and I smile at them. How childish were my suppositions! I had written them in neat clean hand but the whole of them seemed like fog in my mind. I was nearing the end by the time I jotted them down, and did so only for the record, that there might be a record of childish beginnings, and to see how the end was there in embryo all along. I recalled as well how later in my life I had treated Relativity the same way that that an old time fundamentalist would treat his Bible before the coming of public libraries or cheap paperbacks, holding it sacred, and fastening on random passages and giving them out of context private meanings, reading deep cosmic significance into passages where they were surely never intended.
That light requires the same time to travel the path A to B as it does from B to C is in reality neither a supposition or a hypotheses about the physical nature of light but rather a stipulation that I make on my own in order to come to the definition of simultaneity.
One will notice, as one should always notice, that hidden little predicate of “in reality” which is the supposition of hypotheses (or stipulation!) that there is a reality. Does this compute? I have since learned that it does but only when you see reality as a game and the first rule of the game is you have to grant the game master the strict right of creating the conditions to its liking. So it is real but only considered on its own terms or within is own frame. I remember latching onto this statement and taking it as a god like assertion. That a man could order nature of his own free will, or make it as a stipulation or fiat. But of course man in this case was just the interpreter and of his own free will he was recognizing it; but the game master had made reality and it made it on its own say so—that is the world for all of its stolidity was a ad hoc structure, fly by night really, temporary and make shirt, and this was not an ultimate reality. As was always said one thought lead to another, and thought is free; and I will entertain anything to see where it leads. You can be sure that this purple patch of thinking was to play a looming part in what they would later call my delusions, of which it will be said there was more than one.
