Prematurely Mothballed

An old west African witticism claims that “when an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.” I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the translation. The English here sounds like literal truth. This is a boldly stated metaphor that cares little for poetry. It implies, to me, a curdling desperation—a dark pressure to convince. No time for rhyme or rhythm, no juxtaposition. The aged are libraries. Repositories. Knowledge in a precious form. Vulnerable to life’s ravages. Just as bricks crack and fall apart, the most sage of scholars and the shrewdest of gossips will one day fall apart.

Standing outside the library as its rafters lit up like halogen tubes and its windows roared like lions, manes of citrus-hued fire curling over their shoulders, I couldn’t help but feel the screams of each book, their full lives and all that experience melting away. Words trundling off the page in rivulets of black… Smoky appendages lovingly brushing each spine one last time before the consuming red would cut through the shelves like a gash… The spray of the water, a cascade meant to save the world around this mess by ending everything inside…

If I cried, the heat of it all vaporized my tears before I felt them. The secrets within a library—books out of print a half dozen decades, secret scrawls on the underside of shelves, local newspapers dating back to before the civil war—they’re precious. We don’t have many to lose, and we can’t focus every time a secret is lost. Listen to what is being said. Knowledge collects on people like dust in the corners of rooms. It piles up, but it is there for the taking if you know where to seek it.

Companions

There is a slow burn of loathing toward the indigenous pigeon in metropolitan areas . The majority regard them as filthy, indiscriminate in their production of feces and generally disease ridden. They’re noisy, dauntless underfoot and completely, maliciously ubiquitous throughout the urban landscape. I offer up my humble advocacy for the turnabout of this unfair mindset. I say it is time to put a stop to this foolishness and learn to share our city spaces with these exemplary survivors. The pigeon is a pillar of the modern ecosystem; its body is that of a finely tuned, well honed generalist and scavenger, capable of surviving in a multiplicity of environments and temperatures. Our avian neighbors are fast breeding, compact, able to survive on a meager amount of food, and confident in their nesting in the crevices of our creation.

To limit one’s perception of this companion species to a handful of negative traits is simply blindness. It ignores the friendly persona, the simple needs and the beauty of the creature’s sudden transition from terrestrial seeking to effortless flight. Most importantly, it ignores the fact that this creature, among so many, is able to coexist with us. We do not see herds of antelope subsisting on discarded pizza crust and carelessly spilt cereal. Wolves do not camp in the eaves of the public library. Isn’t there a healthy implication of optimism in learning to love what we can have, rather than pining over the lost causes?

We kill everything with our constant excretion of asphalt and rebar. We drive away the other beasts and doom ourselves to this solitary wandering. Be glad that evolution crafts us this great companion, something to live off our detritus and handouts. There will be precious few as time mourns our expansion.

Surroundings

Variety is the spice of life, surely, but we so seldom revel in the heart-stoppingly profound multiplicity of everyday objects. Our engines of production spill our a conglomeration of goods so widely ranging as to mimic a slap in the face. Night and day they spin turbines and pour molds, drinking up resources and piling up the things we take for granted.

You see, words like “common,” “everyday” and “mundane” fill me to the brim with an irate, foamy bile. Don’t people take the time to see this unconquerable miscellany around themselves? A stew of ideas is constantly boiling over with the creativity of our billion disparate minds.

Let us take pens as an example. The humble inkpen, always at hand and always ready to serve, taken for granted and trodden underfoot. I searched long and hard this afternoon through a gasp-inducing array of ink pens. Colors, thicknesses, grip enhancements and ergonomic correctors. There is an ever-growing range of pocket clips and lids. Push-button, spring-loaded tips show an unforeseen assortment of devious incongruity. And this is all to say nothing of the very ink these ubiquitous tools are meant to dispense!

The semiliquid bound within is a rainbow of choices, dark, light, sparkling, thick, thin and vibrant. Each stroke of some pens runs ruin across all but the most stalwart of pages, ink like a brushfire that won’t set for minutes. Others weakly fade in and out, not quite committed to true statement—one foot in the grave of ghost writing. Black ink like a shadow on white marble. Definitive. Bold. Red ink cursing your failures and cutting you down without a moment’s thought.

I urge each and every one of you to dig deep into the well of physical objects around you. We cannot be whole without appreciating the things around us. As ancient botanists observed the plants and flowers, faces full of pollen, we must become students of the cell phone model and the breakfast cereal box. It is deep within us to conquer by appreciation and knowledge, not mere classification. Let the world rain down with a gross mélange of sundries, clattering and splintering against the asphalt. Let the engines of production bury to my knees that I may sort and collect and be a part of every one.

In the Stream

My friend cancelled our meeting this weekend, but I couldn’t see any reason to cancel the tickets. I just find the opportunity to sit in an airport too much to pass up.

I find that the insides of airports are intricate communities. Like malls and themeparks, they’re populated by small armies of loyal employees, each with their own jobs and responsibilities, held together by the bare thread of prolonged physical closeness, if not community. The janitor in his converse and navy jumpsuit--accustomed to the rhythms of the candy girl’s workday—wheels his cart past her as egress and homecoming ebb and flow. She’s porcelain and velvet, clothed so carefully to match the black and white boxes around her. She gleams as positively as the floor her admirer will polish when she goes home.

The pizza shop dispenses nourishment by the slice, a hot, bustling mitochondria in the center of the concourse. The ticket counter is flush with impassive faces and joyless refrains learned by rote. The scales tipped toward efficiency over comfort. Pilots come and go, walking like rock stars, and garnering smiles from their earthbound coworkers. They represent purpose so singularly, that they are familiar, even when foreign. There is a uniformity to these places, but a differentiation (a specialization?) as well.

Magazine racks teem with generic periodicals, but bold faced newspapers and kitschy souvenirs tell you where you are. Geography and culture are only set dressing here. Imperfections that leak through the cell membrane. Windows look out on tarmac that could be anywhere, but information sinks in nonetheless. Signage is customized. The employees share an accent, a style, a home.

Airports around the world are united by purpose. Like cells throughout the body graciously hosting blood from the capillaries as it makes the rounds. The pilots, the attendants, the airlines, they unite these points with their glowing network of jet-fueled beasts. Each airport—as each cell—possesses its own identity, but owes its continuance to a constant flow of sameness from place to place.

Heavy Praise

My recent thoughts, I felt, put me onto an emotional entanglement with the weather. Today’s stifling sky, thick with soft pillows of granite, put me in a heavy, reflective mood, dragging myself through a riptide of old memories; loss and heartache are most prevalent. I think its our universal connection to the grit and pieces of the world that binds us together. As our emotions are a pond of chemicals on our minds, so too are they affected by the ripples around them—tides and winds, falling stones. I sat near the window to observe the autumnal migration of thermometer, barometer and slick falling leaves.

This state, predictably, brought me to Johnny Cash. The man in black slays my every woe with his guitar. The music crashes like waves, and his voice rolls on unstoppable like a diesel engine. It isn’t like a shoulder to cry on—I don’t cry at all. It’s not moping along to the sound of someone else’s depression. You can feel the hardships he’s faced and relive them. I find myself killing a man, surviving a war or losing everyone I love.

This is what it is to have a savior: the man who died, singing through the pain so I could live without it. He cleanses me with his words, holds open the door for me, gives a glimpse of those things we may never, and should never see. It all gives me pause, makes me wonder about what’s inside me, born and living as I have. Wonder if I could have that strength and thank him that he can loan some to me.

The beast in me is caged by frail and fragile bars/Restless by day and by night/rants and rages at the stars/God help the beast in me.

Skies Above

Today, I just took pictures of clouds. It kind of hit me all of a sudden how big they are; almost like floating mountain ranges—their gargantuan bulk capable of undergoing moment-to-moment changes that would occupy their terrestrial counterparts for hundreds of millennia, and all of this silently, crawling over a faded blue mantle without a whisper.

I stressed my telephoto lens, trying to capture the bestial precipices and all their danger: the milk-white cliff faces no climber would ever ascend. At one point I just lay on my back, letting vertigo crawl into my head. My whole body seemed to implode at the suggestion of scale. Imagining my tiny body in proximity to those sky hooks begs innumerable questions. Where else could the throne of Thor be found? What less marvelous thing could bear the name “cumulonimbus”? Is there any other eruption of natural forces that could possibly (nay, that could deserve to) be the genesis of that life-giving lightning that splits the iron gray sky?

Today I shouted those questions toward the shrinking horizon. Today I fell in love again, and my new love is the multitudinous, hulking Vapor Queen of the sky. We all stand trapped between the grassy carpet of our sphere and the ever-changing shell of her cottony cloth.