Missive the Twenty-Eighth
Back to Caveland
On a Stellar Wind.
DATELINE: Saturday, October 21, 2000, at 0315 hours CDT.
Conway, Arkansas, USA
By D. Ebenezer Baldwin Bowles
CornDancer & Company
I want to believe a favourite saying 'round Cricket Song: "Good things will happen." I want to penetrate the depths of the forest and wander upon a mysterious edifice, isolated and grand.
There's a prelude to the saying that goes something like, get outta bed in the morning, put your boots on, and show up, but I can't remember the words, not exactly. Frankly, I'm not sure what's morning and what's night -- and the sage is sleeping now. The sage could tell me, precisely, all of the answers if I could wake him up. I don't wanna try.
When one well is dry - and the primary well is most thoroughly dry tonight - it is good and proper to have another source of living water in reserve, a spare well on the back forty, a full cistern in the garden, a wet limestone spring in the grove, the alluvial gold of sustained life to draw upon.
Ponder how often you may sit in front of an electric computer monitor. Is the view here important to you? I contend that you sit at the portal of a type previously unknown to our species. Could it be that profound? Do you think it might be something totally revolutionary?
An Entire Universe at the Cave Mouth.
In an ordered reading room, peering outward, we sit at the gateway of a portal analogous to the mouth of primitive man's cave. On screen we engage a point of view that represents a desperate attempt by a people removed from the natural realm to return there, to be rooted again as natural men to the entire universe at the mouth of the cave. (Yea, I know, I know: It's as choppy as lake water under a wind that's blustery enough to ruin the Sunday sails. I cannot tonight, revision after revision be damned, connaught canoodle make it read any smoother. I knew I shudnta pursued the universal we. Furl the rowdy sails.)
Imagine how profoundly moving it would be to have a seat at the entryway of a primal cave this very moment. I am safe and warm. Family, food and provisions are behind and beside me. The great, mysterious, and promising world of all things abounds to the front of me. I am, at last, reconnected to simplicity.
Tonight, on the other hand, I can open a portal on my flickering screen and pretend I'm connected to Budapest or Berlin. To a supposed degree of mysterious separation, I am not pretending. Rather, I am connected telemelodramatically to the Paris of the East, to the boreal vortex of Europe, to anywhere I might fancy to navigate beyond the portal of my computer's interface on the screen -- and within my hide-bound modern imagination.
Beyond the entrance of the primal cave, the world immediately visible is very much the totality of the known. In contrast, the wired realities of interconnected humankind, balanced on the fearsome scales of projected vision -- planetary and urban and national -- well…. They just aren't an issue in caveland.
Busy, Rude, Self-Obsessed, and Isolated.
If I hunger for control of a lifestyle beset by busyness and impersonal speed, by rudeness and rampant self-obsessions, by isolation in the crowd and artificial disjunction of family, why would I not be able to find refuge behind the computer screen? I gain control here. I go where I may. Boss and prudence, temerity and responsibility be damned!
"There are vehicles, there are craft in the sky. There is some sort of connection here," the radio voice said, as if it were abiding in the hermitage, hovering in the midnight mist, participating in my monologue. "It is credible."
What if a half-day's walk was the only world known to me?
There, clueless about Mississippi or Casablanca, dumb to the distant marketplace and far-away battlefield, ignorant of last night's fatal auto crash on Interstate Twenty and the awful rape and robbery on a downtown street of South Babylon, I wouldn't have to retreat to sealed offices and gated communities, wouldn't hide behind locked doorways and barred windows to escape the sudden strike of a ghetto gang-banger or the pitiless raid of the badlands outlaws. I could be blithe and ignore the threat to global peace posed by tribal strongmen and fascist demagogues.
Yes, surely I would die from something so mundane as a broken ankle because I couldn't get to the hospital in time, couldn't find the pipeline to antibiotics soups. There wouldn't be a hospital. It wouldn't have been invented. Maybe, though, I would have stronger ankles, the services of a medicine woman, a sounder sense of mortality.
Yes, Not - A Thousand Objections and Arguments.
Yes, many of the children wouldn't make it to puberty, the lions and bears would maul and eat us, and one's imagination would be stunted by so much precious time devoted to the struggle for survival. Not that we don't abort millions, a full two generations slain by collective fear of inconvenience and the horrors of abundance; not that new forms of lion and bear arise annually to replace the extinct, the extinguished, and the vanquished; not that we might sing and tell stories by the cooking fire, play and frolic in the quiet pool and grassy bank beside a wetly flowing stream.
A thousand objections can be promulgated against the ideal of a noble savagery; a thousand counter arguments can be conjured to champion the throwback.
I'm not claiming I want to go there in the flesh of no return. How could I leave this present prosperity to regress to the mouth of a primal cave? I can't say with surety whether it would be a regression, or a stepping stone. Here at the monitor's screen are the surface truths and lies of the world that's been given me. That's that.
Nature of the character I sometimes pine for is a billion bytes removed from my seat here in the study of Cricket Song. It is the Mother Nature and the Thunder Father.
Sometimes I long for a stronger connection to the natural realm, the disk flower of the daisy growing where the diskette now resides. I long, I pine, I ride a stellar wind of dreamy retreat into supposition. The cry of the wolf can be heard through my computer's speakers whenever new E-mail arrives. I've programmed it that way, which is just about as far back into caveland as I can go before the rosy red fingers of Dawn arrive and wipe away the vestige of my primal darkness.
[Afterword for Sadie, for Joe from Arizona, and for the mysterious one in the harbor cafe of my bastard birth: I wrote the hell outta this one, weirdy. I wrote it all the way to Tuscaloosa.]
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