March 25, 2004

  • A 20/20 Day






    Every now and then I'll have a kind of disturbing day.  Disturbing in a joyous perplexing way; I could see the fine grained detail, the perfect image of everything.  No matter how far away or how close everything stood out in crisp clean detail.  I wondered if my eyes somehow had reversed their slide which started when I was six and has reached -8.5 points here in my early forties.


    The clarity I saw looking out the window that day approached prescience!  The sun's perfect light just illuminated everything; no shadows, no distortion, perfection draped over the daily humdrum.


    I was not quite sure if some approaching embolism, aneurysm or stroke was giving me a temporary gift of lucidity.


    Then I had a slightly radical thought; maybe I was actually here, actually present.  I immediatly thought "Oh my God, what have I been missing?"  It is like being Superman without the annoying need to chase after bad guys.  The day shimmered in solid completeness and I wandered like a little kid in the Magic Kingdom.  Wonder, awe, and a sense of serenity enveloped me.  I didn't have my complete attention stolen from me, I was not apprehended by manic bouts of observation; I simply just let it be.  And it was and you know, it was kind of cool and kind of fun.


    I wonder when I'll be there again?

Comments (3)

  • What a wonderful moment of presentness you had! This is what Buddhists try to cultivate.

    Thank you for your kind comments. As for Elizabeth Bishop, she is an extraoridinary poet. Pasted below is one of my favorite poems by her:

    The Man-Moth
    by Elizabeth Bishop
    Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for "mammoth."

    Here, above,
    cracks in the buldings are filled with battered moonlight.
    The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
    It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
    and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
    He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
    feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
    of a temperature impossible to records in thermometers.

    But when the Man-Moth
    pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,
    the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges
    from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks
    and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.
    He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
    proving the sky quite useless for protection.
    He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.

    Up the façades,
    his shadow dragging like a photographer's cloth behind him
    he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage
    to push his small head through that round clean opening
    and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.
    (Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)
    But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although
    he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.

    Then he returns
    to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,
    he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains
    fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.
    The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way
    and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,
    without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.
    He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.

    Each night he must
    be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.
    Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie
    his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,
    for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,
    runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease
    he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep
    his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.

    If you catch him,
    hold up a flashlight to his eye. It's all dark pupil,
    an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
    as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids
    one tear, his only possession, like the bee's sting, slips.
    Slyly he palms it, and if you're not paying attention
    he'll swallow it. However, if you watch, he'll hand it over,
    cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.

  • Ewwww, the line breaks got all messed up. Here's a link to the poem as it is meant to appear:

    http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Elizabeth_Bishop/64

  • I've done that before, I didn't think or analyze or anything, I was just there. Happened when I was camping last time I remember.

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