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Why Light Was Invented That we expect blossoms to be a certain color and texture, that we find them in the alleyways and gather them up in our fists, is not to suggest that the cold eye of the realist should be lower on the totem pole. Or that we can just bounce from one myth to another, and all the while keep burning the English muffins. Special pleading seems to be the rule for those who keep combs in their pockets, those who tender their resignations in the tone of one who never had the job in the first place. But don’t be fooled. Don’t even be illuminated. The nightmares that keep us awake in anticipation are the same as get reviewed in the newspapers, by men who think them sordid and unpleasant, the sort of exercise in masturbation that used to qualify one for the asylum. Or fatherhood, whichever came first. Usually the latter because it takes time to convince others you have spoken to people who do not speak back, who loiter in your closet like nuns and floss their teeth obsessively. Up to twenty hours a day. Just as if they are afraid any less than that will be seen for what it is—a rejection of the concept of order. A bowing out of the universe itself. Perhaps it is they, then, who tell us the pyramid in the back yard should probably be in the front. Because, otherwise, passersby are not apt to notice it. They will miss out on the grandeur and the mystery that comes of it being shaped the way it is. How it appeared one morning without the least hint of where it came from or what it was doing there or who might have constructed it. Though such considerations are never really as important as the thing itself. The sheer true brute fact of it standing in the sun, next to your Japanese Elm.
Charles Freeland | Mudlark No. 35 |