103118 Halloween
El Conchristador walks alone in the forest. Moss is everywhere. It covers the rocks and the tree trunks and it is very wet, dripping sometimes when it condenses just enough to gain some heft. It hangs loosely from the saturated bark that is peeling off of the redwood tree just in front of this mess of a man who just wants to quiet the awful noise in his head; which is why he came to this part of the woods just east of the city of Seattle.
I’ve never had much of an appetite for this world…let me clarify. This world which we created. Which humans created, after we gained enough cranial capacity to house an enormous enough bundle of nerves to process the calculations we needed to do in order to build the things we built. Which is to say, civilization. It had to happen. Brains got bigger and we became more aware of ourselves and our needs and we needed to get organized so that we could provide for those needs. Small groups bundled together and interacted, sometimes nicely, and sometimes not so nicely. But they touched each other and there was a transfer of energy and information and cooperation began to happen.
We built things out of sticks and mud at first…probably. Then rocks and stone and later on steel and concrete. Small things like houses and little storage places for food and animals. Inside the little groups of people the energy transfer became stronger and more pronounced and information storage became a problem because at first we did not write; and so we took that first step toward our eventuality by simply looking at what was happening around us and making a picture of it…probably with a stick in the mud.
And that was the turning point…BOOM…inspiration. How does it happen? Why does it happen? Something inspired that person to pick up a stick and draw in the mud a picture of what he or she was seeing just then. Maybe a tree or a horse or one of those fantastic sunsets we get here in Indiana when it is Fall and a cold front just rushed through and scooped up a bunch of thunderstorms that had been hammering us for days and days. Those are the best sunsets. When the air has just been very warm and humid and suddenly that cold front just magically vacuums it all up and bowls it south toward the lower coast of Georgia. What you are left with is just indescribably beautiful. The air is so clear, and you had just been outside in that overwhelming succulence of a heat wave; but suddenly you stand up and look westward and see that gorgeous amber and violet sun. It just hovers there, all huge and powerful and just radiating light and heat and energy and JOY. And is that what sparks inspiration?
I think that is a possibility. I am having great difficulty reconciling what goes on in our world with what I think should be going on in this world. Yes I know that is a very self-centered thing to say but I am myself and you are yourself and we are ourselves and we all have a sort of personal paradigm for how we think this world should operate. We all are born with certain notions. Natural notions. We are naturally cooperative things. We could not have made it this far otherwise. We all are born with certain talents and abilities and none of us has exactly the same mixture. Which is why we cooperate. The tall man picks apples while the short man picks blueberries. That way we can all fit together like a jigsaw puzzle and form a coherent picture. It’s a valid analogy, I think. When we are sad, a person who is happy transfers some of that happiness to us via a card or a hug or simply a genuine conversation.
We all seek equilibrium, naturally. We are born that way. We want to be with one another and cooperate. That is what I meant when I wrote “should be going on in this world.” But what we are actually doing, as a whole, is heading toward entropy. And that is a very, Very disconcerting concept.
