It’s not as scary as it sounds. The pendulum swings. In world history and politics, in the lives we see around us and, of course, in our own mysterious pathways through our brief time here on the fragile crust of an unpredictable planet. The pendulum at its furthest reach seems a wild thing, nothing but extremes, but then back it swings and we experience stability and calm. Until things careen too far in the other direction. Obviously we are currently at an extreme. My simple advice is this: Hang on.
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FOOD FOR THOUGHT
It’s when you realize that it all is based on rot that a perspective develops.
In spring, from the first crocus to the bursting rhodies in May, the colorful delights belie the truth the nostrils inhale. Rot. Moist, life giving decay. Dusky or dripping, it all adds up to one thing: food for rot. Which is food for thought.
This perspective yields a counter-intuitive bent of mind, a contrarian sense of life enfolded in death. But not only the cold steel nail of death. It’s warm slipping sliding procession of half-measures as a process without beginning or end. The iron rail you were educated to believe you were riding has been bent into a ring, a circle upon which atoms and molecules rise and flower, melt and migrate, form and un-form. Of course, when riding those delusional rails, you claim those tiny bits of structure, the atoms and their infinite morsels, as your molecules.
But you’re riding the ring now. The deed to that landed estate with all its tiny subdivisions down to the quark level has flamed up and out in your hand, even as you held it proudly for all the world and its governments to see. Vanished like a sheet of wrinkled phosphorus paper to the match, a cheap magicians trick. Oh, the trick isn’t cheap. Church and state spend trillions on this illusion. The magician is.
Who can forge this unbending metal rail, to pop it off its spiked cleats from the tarred and gravel imbedded railroad ties? To flame it into a semi molten state then hammer the rude length into curve, into going back on itself, the now welded end now wedded to the beginning, the impossible state of never-never ending.
Only Hephaestus his gnarly dwarf self could accomplish such a feat. Furnace of Olympus, round these futile lives into the eternal glory of the O!
But it must be done. For each of us comes the realization, though often only at the moment of death, that we’re not going to die. Nor were we born. There is no beginning and end, only endless beginnings.
Except for me. All I can think is that tawny, Hephaestus was called away from his hammer as I was being laid out, glowing orange-red on the anvil. Aphrodite, his wandering wife had perhaps been sighted trolloping with Mars, or Apollo, or any number of doomed but dashing humans. And the dutiful little blacksmith, unloved but loving had once again been called forth to retrieve his serial flirt of a wife. Returning to me, the cooled coil of a mortal, anxious to shuffle onto the next to fill his daily quota, he tossed me, bent and with a fatal gap, the ends not quite meeting, the ring not quite ringing, into the day’s pile, an immortal outbox. The Fates, toiling incessantly, would take note of these “gapped” ones.
The difference between a ring and a spiral is momentous. The next question is whether one is spiraling up or down.
It is best that the Fates not be taking note of you.
Because you don’t have it in you to give in to the rot, resign to gravity and the fall, you may be bent but dammit you’re going somewhere. Not just back around. Not just an assemblage of moving parts that whirl through repeated stages of chemical pinball without racking up a score, only repeat plays. And once you are incapable of riding the ring, the meaninglessness-ness-ness-ness-ness-ness-ness-ness-ness-ness-ness-ness-ness-ness-ness-ness-ness-ness-ness
of it all tolls beyond your hearing. You can see the bell tower across the distant Tuscan vineyards, the faithful in droves grimly making their way to church. You know that bell is ringing, you see it swinging in its ancient wooden carriage. But you don’t hear it. Nor would you if hauling on the bell-rope itself.
Thus you are free. Free to dream, free to romance, idealize and plan utopias.
Castles in the clouds or towers of playing cards,
The wind blows them all to dust and ruins and scattered heaps of spades and hearts.
Which you gather and, leaning the three of clubs against the jack of diamonds, begin again.
Because to the Fellowship of the Gap, the Royal Order of The Sacred Spiral, “What’s the use” is “Use the Whats”. Use whatever is at hand, no matter how foolish even to the point of death, to make something. A picture, a song, a dance, a sentence.
Or lacking that, a twig folded twenty-seven times upon itself is the spirit shape of a deer,
which, as it outruns the snapping jaws of the pack
is the essence of…
hope.
Bern Duffy 