The bloggers


The universe
(tiandi) doesn’t play favorites;
it treats all phenomena as if they were straw dogs.
The sage doesn’t play favorites;
he treats the people as if they were straw dogs.

– Daodejing Chapter 5 (my version). According to the Zhuangzi, straw dogs were sacrificial artifacts, treated with the utmost deference before they were used in the offering, and discarded afterwards.

*

The found object: how did it come to be born here, in the hand & in the eye? What does it ask of us? What might it become?

It passes slowly from hand to hand. We speak for it, taking turns. “I fell from the sky.” “I was thrown.” “I was dropped.” “I was laid down.” “I formed here, like dew.” “I sprouted.” “I popped out.” (What a bunch of jokers!)

We still think we’re the only ones here. Our word people means “human beings only.” Animal, mineral, or vegetable, we chant at the start of every game of Twenty Questions. There’s a campfire, of course. We’re singing, A, b, c, double x, y, z. Cat’s in the cupboard & he can’t see me. (Schrödinger never really cared about that poor cat, but we do!)

Well, let’s say someone gets up and tosses it on the fire. Yes. She drops it in the hottest part of the fire. “Now we’ll see!” (Will it burn? Will it burst?)

“Charcoal!”

“Cinders!”

“Ash!”

“Slag!”

(We pass the bottle, now. We fall asleep.)

The forger

Radiant way-making (dao) seems obscured,
Advancing way-making seems to be receding,
Smooth way-making seems to have bumps,
The highest character
(de) seems like a deep gorge,
The most brilliant white seems sullied . . .
The most pristine and authentic seems defiled.
The greatest square has no corners,
The greatest vessel is last to be attended to,
The greatest sound is ever so faint,
The greatest image has no shape.

Daodejing Chapter 41 (Ames and Hall version)

*

Picture an artist’s studio in Montreal. The middle-aged, male artist is chatting with a new female model a few years younger than himself. Many artists he knows prefer to sketch or paint in silence. But how can you paint somebody you don’t know?

“I’m through with slogans and campaigns,” he says when the subject of politics comes up. The causes of his parents’ generation strike him as sad and futile. “‘Never forget?’ As if memory could forestall the ultimate dissolution of all things! Sure, collective memory is a powerful thing. But humanity won’t last forever. Even this planet will be swallowed up by the sun someday.”

“But you do seem to have quite an appetite for the news,” says the model.

As usual, he has the shortwave radio on in the studio. It’s tuned to the BBC World Service, and he keeps it at a fairly low volume so it won’t dominate the conversation – or the play of his own thoughts when he’s alone. Mostly, it’s the sound of the voices that appeals to him, that ceaseless murmur.

“They call it news, but by the time it hits the wires it’s already a little old, you know? The bluebirds continue to perch out there on the electric line as if nothing were happening, even on the coldest days. Now that’s news!”

“What I don’t like,” she says, “is the way different stories of hugely different magnitudes are made to seem like they’re equivalent, just by the way they’re placed side by side in a newspaper, or one after another on the radio or TV.”

“Mmm,” he says. And after a moment: “But that’s not exactly new, is it? And I wonder what the alternative would be? Just yesterday I went for a walk in the country, and was puzzling over the odd conjunctions of animal tracks in the snow. A coyote accompanying three unhurried deer? Raccoon and fox in a pas de deux? Careful, now! This isn’t some tawdry scandal sheet! But when you see a line of small rodent tracks suddenly cease in the middle of a pair of wing prints – well, that’s clearly genuine Page 1 material. Or so I would like to think.”

“You have to be true to your own vision, I guess,” the model says vaguely. But the artist is still warming to his theme.

“My vision? Who says it’s mine? How do I know that? Turn back this way please – right there. Great!”

An hour later, they continue the conversation at a cafe down the street. “I just don’t understand how you can so dismissive of the power of memory,” she says. “Don’t you want to be remembered?”

“Part of me does, yes. But when I paint, I have to put that part aside. I have to forget.”

This is something she hasn’t heard before in all her years of working with Tormented Artists, and it goes very much against the grain of her Jewish upbringing. Which may be why she finds herself wondering whether it’s time to rethink that rule about never sleeping with her clients. The problem with artists, though, is that they’re always so distracted.

“So you think it’s better to forget?”

“No, I never said that! It’s not a question of one or the other. Let the “t” off and what do you get? A forge! In here” – he taps his chest – “or here” – his head – “or maybe – I don’t know. Maybe nowhere!”

“So it’s forgeries you’re after, then!” she exclaims, laughing. “Forgetting does entail a kind of forgery, doesn’t it?”

“No, I think it’s the other way around,” says the painter – who, it might be worth pointing out, gathers a substantial income from the sale of perfect reproductions of the Old Masters, many of which now hang in place of the originals in museums around the world. She doesn’t know this yet, of course. But her interest in the argument intrigues him. He could use an assistant.

“Because, look, at any given moment, the snow is mute. To forge a story from its maze of tracks, you have to forget the present, calculate melt time at various temperatures in the last 24 hours, and weigh the likely scenarios. Even if you set up cameras to record everything as it takes place, whatever narrative you derive from that is still a condensation, an imposition – a forgery.

“But! The patterns visible in the present do have something to say in their own right, I think. And that something changes from one moment to the next, as the sun beats down or more snow falls or another creature forges through the snow.”

“And what if that creature is you?”

“Or you! Imagine this: Imagine if every time you looked at a painting, everywhere your gaze tracked it would leave an impression in indelible paint. Imagine if we couldn’t look at anything without overwriting it, without leaving our own tracks. Not only would paintings become wholly transient things – or happenings, really – but the distinction between artist and non-artist would largely disappear. Museums would lose their separation from the rest of the world.”

“But surely you can’t want that!”

He smiles. “What makes you think it isn’t already true? Every time we look at something, we’re changed in some way ourselves, yes? And as we change, from one moment to the next, our perception changes. We do leave tracks, even if they are visible only to ourselves.”

“Okay. But something tells me that if seeing were as physically consequential as you seem to wish, that things would develop very thick layers of paint in some areas, and thin to nonexistent layers in others. Any artistry a painting might have at first – or, I mean, right after someone with real artistic vision interacted with it – would quickly be overwhelmed by the untrained gaze of the mob.”

“Would it? I don’t know. I have a hunch that those unpainted areas would quickly develop their own charism, so to speak, and that the feedback loops formed by such interactive gazing, in combination with an ordinary intelligence, would eventually lead almost everyone to become expert in the art of forgery.”

She laughs. “So you would save nothing – no artifact of anyone’s private vision?”

“Oh, I would! But paintings age just as we do. The colors fade. Grime collects. The paint cracks. They change, and our collective evaluations – our memories – change with them. I mean, the act of restoration can be highly controversial. Restore it to what?

“Oh c’mon. It’s not that bad!”

“It can be. Think of how the great cave paintings in France and Spain were threatened by the mere presence of visitors: not only the molds and spores we carry with us, but the very carbon dioxide we exhale was profoundly damaging to them. In order to preserve anything at all, they had to be completely sealed away again. Faithful reproductions were created with the help of digital imaging so visitors would have something to look at in their stead.”

“If you don’t want immortality, what do you want?” she asks softly.

“I want to immerse myself in that forging,” he says, his eyes flashing. “That’s all! Not to be an artist. Not to be anything! Simply to become a part of everything that is beautiful, spontaneous, original!”

He touches her hand. “You and I – we’re nothing. Mayflies. Soap bubbles. There’s no great Artist in the sky. There’s only . . . ”

She places a sudden finger across his lips. They slowly get to their feet, put their coats on and pay the bill without another word. Outside, the streets are glistening with melting snow.

__________

Thanks to Susan, whose typo in a recent comment thread prompted this little exercise in philosophical fakery.
UPDATE (Feb. 4): Thanks to Siona for suggesting some additional insights.

The smoker

In concentrating your qi and making it pliant,
Are you able to become the newborn babe?
In scrubbing and cleansing your profound mirror,
Are you able to rid it of all imperfections?
In loving the common people and breathing life into the state,
Are you able to do it without recourse to wisdom?
With nature’s gates swinging open and closed,
Are you able to remain the female?

– Daodejing Chapter 10 (Ames and Hall, tr.)

*

The mother crouches, bears down. Focuses all her energy on her abdomen, where her body’s snake lies coiled. The baby slips down the birth canal and out. It glistens; it glows. Buzzed on adrenaline, it is more fully awake now than it will ever be again, with a few possible exceptions.

The mother cleans this new creature, suddenly not-her but not yet a wholly distinct presence in the world. She eats the umbilicus and the neither/nor substance that follows the birth, returning them to her abdomen. The infant’s initial luster fades a bit, and the flame-like pattern of its pelt blends with the splashes of sunlight in this forest clearing. Choosing her steps cautiously – a leap here, a circling dance step there – the mother moves off.

Lying in a bed of ferns, the newborn knows nothing of fear or danger. The stimuli entering its ears, eyes and nostrils are all equally strange and wonderful. A few of the sounds seem familiar, though this side of the womb they are much more distinct. Weeks will pass before it begins to discriminate, to learn which things are the most desirable. But in just a few days, it will learn to flee from anything out of the ordinary. Excitement will become linked with fear; good things are bland and filling, like mother’s milk.

Flies don’t land on it yet. As the day warms up, hornets begin exiting their underground hive through a hole just inches away from its rear end, but there’s nothing to excite them about this new warm object. The mother stands a hundred feet away on high alert. Any predator that might happen to wander into the vicinity will smell only her, and with luck, can be coaxed into giving chase.

The human being who has been watching all this through binoculars from a nearby blind is astonished. She is on assignment from Conservation International and the Bronx Zoo to track down rumors of a deer-like animal unknown to Western science, deep in the forested headwaters of three great rivers. Now she debates whether she should report this discovery at all. The publicity might attract poachers, and who knows what else.

All around the birthing area, the air shimmers, like the air above a lake on a sunny day. I wonder if it’s true, what they say – that it can walk on grass without bending a blade, even walk on water? Because the Han Chinese villagers who farm upland rice in this region call the creature by its ancient name Qilin. They want so badly to believe that a new era of peace and prosperity is on its way!

But what could be more natural than to accept that it might be true? Here in these mountains, where nation-states are a far-off rumor and the global market a semi-legendary beast, anything seems possible.

She wouldn’t realize for several hours yet that her craving for nicotine has suddenly, finally evaporated – or, more likely, returned to whatever creative nothingness it had originated in, years before. How can one notice something no longer present? But as she watched the birth unfold, she had felt something loosening in her own abdomen and sat up straighter, breathing all the way from her heels. It smelled like spring.

The drinker

Without setting foot outside your door, you can know everything under heaven.
Without looking out the window, you can grasp how Nature works.
The farther one goes,
the less one knows.

Thus the sage knows without stirring,
recognizes without seeing,
accomplishes without making any particular effort.

Daodejing Chapter 47 (translation mine)

*

Sunlight pours in through the bow window of his apartment in the assisted living facility. He sits in a pool of it, luxuriating in the warmth and the full-belly feeling that follows a hearty breakfast. The latest issue of Time magazine is open on his lap – an amusing read, he thinks, so long as one doesn’t allow oneself to get angry at the enormous presumption of its name, its absurd and undeserved sense of cultural significance.

He skims a two-page excerpt of Christine Todd Whitman’s new book, It’s My Party, Too – ah, the rage of the privileged classes! Then his eye alights on a full-page ad for “DoubleTree, A Member of the Hilton Family of Hotels.” More family values? Well, maybe.

The ad is an obviously fake photo of a couple kissing underneath a pair of saplings pruned in the shape of popsickles. Behind them a sturdy-looking fence guards the edge of a precipice, and an ocean at sunset stretches beyond. Off to one side, a coin-operated telescope points stiffly up and in the opposite direction from the couple. The man is dressed like a businessman – white dress shirt and creased slacks – and she like a school girl: knee-length skirt, light sweater, hair in a ponytail. The copy reads,

Warm.
Familiar.
A place where you’ll be well taken care of and comfortable.

So you can focus on something else.
Or everything else.

The twin trees’ foliage blends together directly above the merged heads of the couple. In fact, if the man were to straighten up, his head would be caught in the leaves. She, of course, is craning on her tip-toes to reach him. There’s the faintest suggestion of a bulge in the front of his pants.

Corporate mergers are in the news again, and perhaps there’s some kind of subtext here designed to appeal to the business traveler. It’s very well done, really, the old man murmurs, stroking his chin. A shower of dandruff cascades onto the page. Amused, he strokes harder. The lower half of the ad rapidly becomes buried in white. He cackles with glee. “Time for another whiskey, my boy!” he says in his best Studs Terkel voice.

Halfway around the world, the lovers are just drawing apart, just opening their eyes and beginning to focus on the world around them. She lets out a little cry. “My God!” says the businessman. “It’s snowing!”

The plagiarist

Credible words are not eloquent,
Eloquent words are not credible.

– Daodejing Chapter 81 (Ames and Hall, tr.)

*

One line a day, he thinks, just like Dylan Thomas. But his project differs radically from the old drunk wordsmith’s, who hammered out each word in the forge of whatever. He has no use for such self-conscious perfection – in fact, he’s not sure he wants to write anything particularly memorable at all. He aspires instead to the perfection of the found object, whose charm would consist solely in being removed from its originating context and placed in another. Each line like a grain of sand struck from some granite headland, rolled in the waves until smooth, and deposited on a beach. Perhaps it is true that a visionary might see the universe in a grain of sand. But most people just want to walk along the edge of the ocean in their bare feet, letting the waves curl around their ankles. And certain ankles are worth dying for, he thinks – far more so than any art. Just ask Proust.

There’s no first line. How can there be? He starts at random and works in both directions, and after a while he sees that new lines can be inserted at various points in the growing text. Not that they’re interchangeable, of course. His poor memory works for him as often as it works against him, because he finds himself returning often to the same or similar themes – just as an elderly person will retell the same story over and over. But it’s not the same story, if you listen. And poetry is nothing if not a supreme effort at listening, on the part of author and audience alike. Repetition in a poem is one of several tried-and-true methods for seducing the ear.

Seduction: that’s the goal. To charm, to re-enchant. Without some kind of poetry in our lives, is true love even possible? Without persuasion, the lonely soul can only connect with others through brutality, through hatred. Get that down, he says to himself. Child soldiers in a guerrilla army he’s read about, who chop the hands off other children for no reason. Someday, perhaps, a look or touch of wholly undeserved compassion (is there any other kind?) will shatter them. Put that in.

Time is on his side, because that’s where he likes it – close enough to keep an eye on. His theme, to the extent that he can be said to have one, is simply: things happen. Not shit, never. Sometimes he does feel that way, but those lines never see daylight. Line by line he comes to feel – not merely to understand, but to know in his bones – how much of a role time plays in everything. It’s the ultimate context, from which no escape is possible or even desirable. What makes the ordinary seem extraordinary is just this consciousness of the extreme unlikelihood of its ever coming to be. One line at a time.

Then one day, out of the blue, he hears a whisper in his ear and feels a warm breath on the back of his neck. Thank you for writing my poem, the voice says. In a flash, he sees that every single line he thought he had written had in fact been borrowed, and that now it’s time to return them to their rightful owner. He turns slowly around. I thought you’d never find me, he says.

Brush Mountain

Sleep, I realized long afterwards, is the one thing that keeps us human, keeps us animal. Go without sleep – all sleep – for too many days in a row, and you lose the ability to inhabit your own body. Pain and pleasure become increasingly abstract. Your consciousness floats in an ether of pure mentation, immune to all worldly beauty. There are two doors, one marked Suicide and the other marked Madness. “What is behind door number three?” you want to know. There must be another way out! But Door # 3, if it even exists, is firmly locked and barred. To sleep, perchance to dream…

I was 16. I had been reading D.T. Suzuki on Zen and filling notebooks with increasingly incoherent thoughts, night after night. Odd things happened. On the day following my fourth sleepless night I completely dominated a volleyball game in gym class, I who had never had quick reactions and was completely unathletic (but in good shape from walking five miles a day, to and from school). That was an intensely egoistic high, a true power trip that I still recall with a bit of nostalgia, how I leapt and dove and shouted, eventually the only one left on my side of the net, playing against a half dozen jocks and winning. “So that’s what it feels like not to think, not to be self-conscious, never to second-guess oneself!” I said to myself afterwards. Who’d have thought that being a machine would feel so liberating?

On the morning after my fifth night without sleep, I was sitting in Miss McCaughey’s Spanish 2 class when the last thread connecting me to earth suddenly snapped. In a flash I realized that everything was empty, empty! I put my unreal books in my unreal pack, got to my unreal feet, and walked out of the unreal classroom and its soulless holographs of human beings, one of whom – the teacher – asked me where I was going. “Out,” I said. I remember her standing at the door of the classroom, watching me walk slowly and deliberately down the hall.

Poor Miss McCaughey! It was only her second year of teaching, and she told me later she’d thought she must’ve done something horribly wrong. When she recovered from her shock, she sent my friend Jim out to find me, but by that time, I was gone.

Gone. Out of the hated school that I now knew to be nothing but a test and a trick. Every sentient being had already achieved enlightenment but me; I was convinced of it. That very realization constituted my own ticket, I thought. I was flooded with something that might have been joy, if I had had any normal emotional reactions left with which to experience it. Now all I needed to do was walk out of the stage set. I was sure the exit would appear, and I’d know it when I saw it. All I had to do was abandon all lingering attachments to the world, expect nothing, and wait for the moment, which was already present, to fully present itself to me.

I dropped my pack by the side of the road. No need for that any more! Following my familiar route across town, I tried to climb the steep path up the side of the High School Hill and found I could not. Freezing rain a couple days before had turned the snow into slippery concrete in which it was impossible to find a foothold. I clawed my way about fifty feet up the side, slipped, and slid back down. Nothing to do but circle the hill, then, as I had done in the opposite direction just a few hours earlier, but had already completely forgotten. No wonder I believed so fervently in the perpetual present – it was all I had left.

A half hour later, on my way out of town, I remember stopping in the middle of the bridge over Bald Eagle Creek and staring at the water, fascinated. I took off my gloves one at a time and dropped them in the water, watched them float rapidly away. My hat followed. I think I probably would’ve taken off all my clothes if it hadn’t been so cold out.

The sun beat down from a sea of blue – all light, no heat. The snow-blinding world glittered, impenetrable. I don’t remember much of my walk up the hollow. It’s amazing, really, that I remember any of this at all. Some time around noon, I think, I reached the end of our mile-and-a-half-long driveway and started across the lawn toward the house. That’s when it finally hit me, the sudden realization I’d been waiting for. If I had to put it into words, it would be something along the lines of, Dude, you’re out of your fucking mind!

Everything fell into place. I know that’s a cliché, but it’s also the perfect image for what happened. Everything fell back into its rightful place and I stood there in the glare ice under a cloudless sky staring at the house I’d grown up in, aware and ashamed of my nakedness before the world. I looked all around. The mountain – this mountain – was just a mountain again.

As I walked in the door, the phone started ringing. Let’s get this over with as quickly as possible, I remember thinking, as a great wave of weariness crested and broke.

Falconiform

At ease, lieutenant.

Thank you, sir.

I understand you’ve been able to keep all the runways free of pigeons for the last week with just two birds.

Yes, sir.

How is that possible? Do they really kill that many pigeons?

No, sir. They haven’t killed more than half a dozen. What happens is that the regular presence of a hawk or falcon completely traumatizes a local prey population. They either lie low, only venturing a few feet from cover, or they move somewhere else entirely.

Kind of a shock and awe thing, then?

Yes, sir. (To incoming falcon) Here we go. Good boy! (Falcon lands on glove. The falconer deftly secures the leather straps around its feet and slips a hood over its head.)

What – what’s the hood for?

Oh, it just keeps them tractable, sir. They’re very high-strung. The very thing that makes them such effective killing machines – that single-minded intensity – makes them less than ideal pets, I’m afraid.

Not something I’d want my five-year-old to play with, eh?

No, sir!

Now, what species is this one here? Is this a peregrine?

Its daddy was a peregrine, yes sir. But it’s a hybrid: its mother was a merlin.

How is that possible? Artificial insemination?

Yes, sir.

They must be quite valuable, then.

Yes, sir. I wouldn’t be able to afford them if I didn’t breed them myself.

Oh, really? Do you mind my asking how you do that? I mean, I grew up in cow country, I know how they do it with bulls…

(Chuckles.) Well, sir, it’s a little different, I think. I have a special hat that I wear…

Shaped like a female falcon, I suppose?

Well, no, sir, that isn’t necessary. I use the same hat for all my birds – everything from kestrels to red-tail hawks. See, the kind of visual cues they respond to are more motion-oriented, just like they won’t go for a pigeon unless they see it fluttering or walking around.

So you put on this special hat and you, um…

I initiate courtship, sir. (Chuckles.) I do exactly what a sexually receptive female of their own species would do: about five minutes of head and torso bobbing, like this, then…

(Incredulously) They mistake you for a female falcon? I thought these birds were considered highly intelligent!

They have just enough brains to do what nature designed them to do, sir. Find the target. (Continues miming falcon courtship display.)

Thank you, that’s enough, lieutenant.

Yes, sir.

Carry on, then.

Yes, sir. (Salutes, keeping left arm horizontal. Falcon swivels its hooded head and clicks its beak.)

Nick at night

Flying quickly becomes tiresome, you know. I was watching the clouds: low and fast moving, an ever-shifting panoply of dark and light. As dusk came on I heard a few scattered calls of tundra swans. I scanned the sky, spotting the “V” just a few seconds before it shot behind the ridge. Talk about a tailwind!

Then to work. I descended the tree, brushed the soot from my suit, walked quickly through the middle distance into the foreground until the landscape became too small to hold me any longer. Since my mood was clearly favoring a “breath-taking sense of elemental fury,” as an art critic once said, I chose something by Martin Johnson Heade – no dark Satanic mills, if you don’t mind! Nobody was in the hall when I stepped down out of it and headed for the exit. Of course, technically, for me this world is All Exit – pace my friend Jean-Paul – but let’s not go there, as the kids say.

Screw the teenagers, though. Christmas is for children – gotta get ’em when they’re young and impressionable and ready to swallow any story that lends a bright red glow to the satisfaction of selfish desires and calls it magic. Ah, the lights, the carols, the smell of gingerbread, of a freshly cut fir! Ah, the sweets!

Here’s a young mother who takes the spirit of Christmas to its logical extreme. She’s shacked up in this dingy motel room with her two little kids to escape a court order awarding custody to the father, who sits at home staring at a half-decorated tree and a pile of unwrapped toys, weeping tears of pure frustration. The girl – let’s call her Gretel – she’s only four, a cute blonde thing, too young to really know what’s going on. But her older brother Hansel watches through big, dark eyes as their mother bends over the mirror, vacuuming the little trail of white crumbs into her ravenous nostrils. Let it snow, ha ha!

Yes, that’s right, children, Mommy lives in a magical house of sweets in the middle of the dark forest. Well, as I said a moment ago, the world is full of exits. Here’s a newly homeless guy still struggling with the mayor’s new math: 2000 beds for over 4500 people, 23 percent of them veterans like himself. Illegal to sleep in public, but they won’t jail you for it – that would defeat the purpose, now, wouldn’t it? So our Odysseus is contemplating an act of armed robbery or a mugging – anything to get him arrested and out of this cold and biting wind. But he pictures the stricken look on the faces of his victims and he just can’t do it, can he? No, not without flashing back to scenes of that bridge in Baghdad, the cars that wouldn’t stop, the shattered bodies of children looking so much like his niece and nephew back in St. Louis.

But he’s got his ticket, you see, and the Marines trained him very well in its use. It’s been so long since he’s had a good night’s sleep that the mere thought of it drives him half-crazy with longing. He remembers the snug Christmas Eves of his not-so-distant childhood, visions of dancing sugar plums and all that. You see how simple it is to distort a person’s memories with just a few words whispered in the wind? Because in reality, of course, he never slept on Christmas Eve, but lay sleepless with excitement as the clock ticked and the hours crawled by.

Something of that excitement, that electric current in the veins lingers even now, as he fits the cold muzzle of the gun into the hollow under his chin. Only an idiot would risk a side-of-the-head placement. The notion is offensive for aesthetic as well as practical purposes. Well, I’d love to stick around and watch his magic disappearing act, but I’ve got a lot of ground to cover tonight. Where’s that asshole Rudolf?

Shooting the water

A small procession on a red dusty road, and everyone’s dressed in red, red. The pace is not fast, the song is not slow, the pines aren’t stirring in the breeze. As they grow nearer you can see the black coffin, and it’s only three feet long, my dear, it’s only three feet long.

*

Well, yesterday morning I was making breakfast, and believe me when I tell you that there was nothing different about that. I always make the very same thing, because who wants a surprise first thing in the morning – or second, or third? A glass of orange juice from concentrate and two eggs fried sunny-side up in butter, sprinkled with dried tarragon. I sat down with the newspaper while I waited for the eggs to fry, my plate heating on a separate burner. Well, just as I got up and started across the kitchen toward the stove, I had the strangest feeling. It was a little like that feeling of weightlessness or disassociation one gets during orgasm, except there was no sensation involved, no question of pleasure or release – simply an absence. It lasted for less time than it takes to tell you about it, because to become conscious of a thing like that is to banish it almost immediately. Indeed, what I call a feeling was probably not the experience itself but its impression, like the afterimage that forms on the inside of your eyelids if you open your eyes for a split second and close them again.

*

What are they singing, these people, and why don’t they all look sad? The road is straight and hot and the heat waves make their legs appear to wobble from side to side. I climb the bank and rest in the shade of the scrubby pines, waiting, my camera at the ready. As they get closer, I notice something odd: the coffin has no lid.

*

Warning: objects in dreams are farther away than they appear. Whenever I happen to wake, right away I begin thinking about blogging. A dream that might otherwise seem unremarkable gains in significance simply from the prospect of being recounted. But I’m always wary of “recounting fraud,” you know? I ask myself, were things really so logical? Were they even as sequential as narrative conventions imply? And what was so frightening, why did familiar landmarks seem so huge, so full of shadows? The letter killeth; but the spirit giveth life. I turn over onto my left side, knowing that I can only fall asleep on my right. Just before I drift off, I’ll roll back into place.

*

Like a log, my dear. I always sleep like a log. Like a log hitching a ride in a coffin. I peer through the telephoto lens in disbelief. They’ve dressed it in baby clothes, but it’s clearly no infant. If they’d debarked it, I might not have recognized it, but I can see the reddish-brown plates: it’s a mate to the trunks I’m standing among. The people shuffle past in weary cadence, clapping softly the way you clap when the cemetery’s a mile or two from town.

*

It’s rare that I’m terrified of something in a dream, but it’s just as rare that I don’t feel at least a little fearful. Face it, I’m a slow moving, medium-sized mammal with a number of potential predators to worry about. Sometimes I’m smaller and more rodent-like, but I’ve never yet dug my own burrows, always taking over the abandoned homes of other creatures instead. That’s human enough, isn’t it? At one point last night, for example, I was exploring a couple of woodchuck burrows near the top of the field that seemed to open up into some kind of cavern. I decided to test the echo, stuck my head into one of the holes and gave a roar. A couple of huge shadows detached themselves from the side of the pit and growled back, a low rumble. I felt a blast of hot, stinking air like a week-old corpse.

*

Whose log-body can this be, dressed so fine for its own funeral? I follow at a distance, already picturing how this will look on the glossy pages of National Geographic. The scene at the cemetery merits a three-page pull-out, at least. In place of gravestones, large, curved animal horns jut from the earth. Some are painted white; others have been wound about with colored yarn. Little bells dangle from the point of every horn. The wind is a welcome visitor, it seems.

*

Have you ever felt a wind inside your skull? Talk about mute, abject terror! A nightmare you’ll remember years later, looking through a magazine at the dentist’s office with the whine of the drill dimly audible above the Muzak. You find you can’t concentrate on much besides pictures, and fortunately this magazine has quite a few. In fact, it’s difficult to find the articles, apart from the captions and a few paragraphs following the titles – or are they headlines? The Misunderstood Manta. Ancient Nubia: Birthplace of the Pharoahs? A Funeral for the Whooping Cough. And here’s a nice piece on the Venus de Milo, which seems so emblematic of something or other. (Yes, of course she’s a which, never a who.)

*

Listen. Here it comes now through the pines, hissing. A gourd rattle gives it legs. Someone starts swinging a bullroarer and all the hair stands up on the back of my neck. The shutter clicks away, seemingly of its own accord: the sound made by the claws of rats on an empty granary floor. Not that they’d ever print that sort of thing. By the time the editors get done with my prose, baby, I barely recognize myself among all the cliches. I might as well be shooting so much water under a bridge, back in goddamn Iowa.

Death takes a whiz

There was nowhere to go. We had stopped at some sandwich cart with a few rickety tables on the sidewalk. I like to linger over lunch, but that day my co-worker had an errand to run, so I was left with an extra half a beer to drink in addition to my cup of tea. That’s where my problems started.

Every time I thought I had found a good place, someone would happen along, laughing and pointing at my evident discomfort. A pair of young women walked by speaking what I took to be a South Asian language, judging from their appearance, and one of them actually reached out and pinched my arm, as if testing for spoilage. I was momentarily distracted from my quest by the flash of white teeth in a dark face. Perhaps they had mistaken the urgency in my body language for something else?

But no – they had come looking for me. New trainees, told to find the skinny American. Or so I gathered from their replies, which were delivered amid much nervous giggling. We walked back together.

Our factory may not look like much from the outside, but it’s full of the most advanced instruments ever assembled in one place. Over here, for example, is a cross between a radial arm saw and an electron microscope: watch. The women had donned facemasks and gloves and, regrettably, pulled borrowed lab coats around their form-fitting jeans. Part of the reason for the uniform, I knew, was to discourage human contact between workers on the job. They needed total concentration for the delicate piecework involved in the engineering of new life.

I showed them the series of permutations necessary to turn stem cells into plant or animal tissue. One of them drew my attention to an odd pattern of molecules on the screen: Is that the logo? she asked in her lilting English. I stared at it. Believe it or not, I’d never noticed it before. I guess that’s why we like to hire women for this sort of work. Look, it’s on everything!

I walked over to a terminal, typed in molecular logo and pulled up a dozen papers on the subject. I skimmed through the abstracts, reading the good parts out loud. Somehow, the company had stumbled on a virus-like, self-replicating compound that had the power to persist outside its host indefinitely, even after the last bit of tissue had decayed. It could survive in the vacuum of space, at temperatures a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. In the fullness of time, it would be omnipresent. The God logo, they dubbed it.

At last, the women had stopped their nervous giggling. The taller one shivered, and they did that sideways-embrace thing that marked them as sisters. Excuse me, I said, and ducked into the only modern bathroom for miles around.