Missive the Thirty-Seventh
Reality Takes a Turn
Toward the Radical.
DATELINE: Tuesday, November 21, 2000, at 2345 hours CDT.
Conway, Arkansas, USA
By D. Ebenezer Baldwin Bowles
CornDancer & Company
During a stroll in the garden, noticing that the frozen nights had brought an end to the peppers and begonia, I stopped to consider reality, but was thwarted when an ice bomb, formed from passenger jet effulgent, crashed onto the lane in front of me.
Do I create reality with each successive breath?
It wasn't an ice bomb that stopped Staff Sergeant Ajax Johnston, United States Army Infantry, from further consideration of reality on May 11, 1970. Rather, a mortar round launched by the Viet Cong crashed from the skies, detonating on his head. His disaster was total and absolute. The reality he represents is a name inscribed on a wall of black granite, a few orderly letters of the alphabet affixed to a monument commemorating a war lost by all but the distant pacifists.
Is Sergeant Johnston's reality any less real than mine, now, in this moment that doesn't care to end? All this talk about alternative universes, trickery and illusion, gives me cause to wonder.
Let's Return
To the Ghostly Fields of Another's Battle.
Am I the slain soldier, deceived into thinking that the act of pushing pencil lead across the ordered space of a tabular field is real? The act is real, is it not? How less real does it become when I cut the guts from the sentence? How much clarity is gained by the parsing, the gutting, and the belated return to the ghostly fields of another's battle?
I can't say why Ajax comes to mind tonight. The memory could be inspired by something as simple as echoes from the battle scenes of War and Peace, which I viewed on televised cinema early this morn -- but I think not. Instead, I suspect I remember him because I'm thinking I'm embattled, besieged, and under assault. Developments on the physical plane have taken their turn for the worse. Notices arrive to give sharper teeth to the chupacabras on the dark side of my boundary lines. I'm not too surprised, then, with the flood of remembrances of olden days when Ajax and I and a band of many others strolled the perilous zone of war.
(Yeah yeah I know I know who wants to wrestle with the complexities of life when all you did was open E-mail.)
I don't know what they want anymore, which presupposes that once I did know. Do you know what your mother wants, not from life and life only, but from you, daughter of mine? Do you know what gifts to lay at the feet of your true love when you hear her sobbing in the dark and forlorn night? How much, I ponder, should we pay the piper to silence his tune?
Beyond the melodrama, the surface fiction of flat characters I can never know, I am become incapable of tears. No, I am not crying. I do not cry for them. The mist you observe, glistening in my eyes, is an illusion. Can they duplicate my pain? Mind you, not that I own up to any.
What is real in the regions we create, here and now, to share thought?
Transformed, Transferred, Deep and Abiding.
I am the voice at the far end of the cathode ray. You are the hope and the prayer, the splendrous bloom of May and the terrible executioner of December. What began as grey lead being pushed across lines on paper is transformed through successive generations into the transfer of thought from one intellect to another. Am I real to you who are the collected ones, the individuals gathered into distribution groups, the names I attach to remembrances of flesh and blood beings -- you who are my fantasy, the loyal and doting audience? If not doting, then loyal. If not loyal, then the audience. If not the audience, then deep and abiding loss.
"Let's not make waves," the student of cold fusion interjects. "Let's avoid the Big Disgrace!"
I do not need your cold fusion, your payload, your leverage. I am protected here at Cricket Song by the sheltering trees, the cypress fences, and the moat, but only to a thin degree of physical separation.
Daddy State's Darlings Shall Cringe and Crumble.
Know this: The psychic shields I raise for mercy's sake are stout, pertinent, smartly structured, and persistent. Rays of the whirl on an eternal vortex, they can hold. They will. "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world," W.B. Yeats declared. I care not about the centre, which they claim as a birthright. I realize at the dawn of my end game that I am permanently relegated to the fringes. The centre no longer exists as a source of power to me. It is their centre, not mine. I have learned to live amidst the rubble of their spiritual anarchy. They are the material subordinates, Daddy State's darlings, and they shall surely cringe and crumble when the centrist security, which they cling to with contentious desperation, begins to fall apart, rapidly with a hideous cry, before their keening eyes, which become blank and tearful.
"Be careful, my wayward keep," said Oksob, duly concerned. "Theirs is a ministry of the free fall. Do not stand within the eyelash of their disorder."
I suppose my choices are slim and none. Something is most assuredly wrong with the picture here. Cricket Song lacks the firepower to repel their sustained assault on the physical plane. A certain physical aspect of their reality can intervene. What will be will be: Let it be resolved by destiny.
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