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| Dr. Livingston, I presume?I leave for London in four days.
Fairwell, Topeka, Kansas, my friends and acquaintances, the prerogatives of my middle class life, etc.
Right now I'm sitting on my back patio smoking a cigar and watching my dog eat bugs.
I've been thinking:
Where will I be in thirty years? (That's an arbitrary date)
The south pole.
I've decided what I want to do with my life. I want to be an explorer. I want to discover some lost civilization, or maybe a stone-age Amazonian tribe or an exotic species of mammal whose genus will bear my name. I'll even settle for a river or an ice sheet or something like that. The requisite for any good explorer is vanity.
That's my point.
Anyway, back to Star Trek.
You will always be my first true love.
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| What’s your haplotype? A brief history of my Y-chromosome:After the Civil War, my great great grandfather John moved from Raleigh to Indiana with a Quaker woman from Delaware named Hadley who had worked with the underground railroad. He was a Confederate soldier. I haven’t the slightest idea how they met. I’ve heard this story in bits and pieces.
Beyond the uncertainties of slavery or adoption we figure ourselves into history, tracing back our generations. Lately, my dad’s really gotten into researching his genealogy. This tells me something about him. I’ll listen, so he talks to me about it with an almost boyish enthusiasm. My great great grandfather John’s farm in Indiana was flooded and everything was lost. He moved his family to Kansas and settled on the top of a hill - uneconomical and secure, and it was here the Thompson family struggled through a couple more generations until the county bank foreclosed on their farm during the depression and they moved into town.
John’s son Arthur loved to play croquette. He had built for himself a croquette court in his back yard which he kept well watered and immaculately mowed. He also loved machines. He was one of the first to buy a car - a Model T, and during the boom years of the 1920s he bought a gas-powered combine for his farm. A few more years and the economy went sour and he couldn’t pay off the money he’d borrowed and the bank took everything, croquette court, car, combine and all. Fuck you, Mr. Hoover.
My grandfather Arthur jr., John’s grandson, slept with a wet rag over his face during the worst of the dust bowl. Immense clouds of eroded topsoil would blow in from the west, covering everything, getting into clothes and dishes and food. He told me that his family would wake up in the morning not sure what they’d eat for dinner that night. Boiled chicken bones and cornmeal, maybe. He said it taught him not to take anything for granted. I still don’t really realize what this means.
At the end of his life, after two years in a Nazi prison camp and a career in the air force, Arthur jr. settled in Wichita and opened a health food store. He was fanatical. He rarely ate processed food or meat. Whenever I’d visit he’d fix me these disgusting carrot smoothies with his Veg-o-matic, a barbaric contraption which could liquify any substance into a foul tasting sludge that, he always insisted, was good for my eyesight. All that Vitamin A.
I'd like to learn something from all of this.
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| Goodnight, goodnightMorning: drunk, sure.
Dawn is uncivilizing.
My night in its inevitable story of decline.
Dawn drags my religion into backwards mysticism,
and so I must supplicate now in this new way:
with the yolk of a hangover oozing
over toast: with my failed intuition.
I drink coffee: my former glory.
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| The human brain has enough neurons to form 1,070,000,000,000,000 different thoughts.
How profound.
One of those thoughts is: alcoholic Wednesday rather than non-alcoholic Wednesdays.
And Thursdays?
And another: Tomorrow morning quiz over currency devaluation and the Asian financial crisis - I am passionately in love with life. I'm not going to study.
Instead,
I'm going to get sushi with James.
I'm just biding my time till he gets here.
Happy Quatro de Mayo. | | |
| To sleep, perchance . . .Sleepless. Was reading the latest issue of National Geographic and came upon this quotation which I think is quite compelling. It's from an interview with biologist Edward O. Wilson. He says:
"Well, the human mind has evolved to search for meaning. The universe is so beautiful and complex and surprising, and life is too. You remember Darwin's line, 'Endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved'? We see this far more than Darwin ever could. We see right down to the molecular level, how truly extraordinary life is as a phenomenon. There you have more to summon spirituality than anything provided by the late Iron Age desert kingdom scribes who wrote the Holy Bible. They created an impressive piece of literature. But they really didn't understand the world around them or the stars above. They metaphorized them, put poetry into them - they did the best they could. But still and all, they fell far short of what humanity is capable of feeling in a sense of the sacred and of aesthetic beauty."
That's sorta how I feel.
Today I sat on my back porch and read for a while and watched the birds gather around the bird feeders - sparrows, doves, bluebirds, mocking birds, woodpeckers. I think of all that had to have coincided to bring them in front of me here to witness, from the microscopic mechanisms of their genes to that image in my own mind - in the physical structure of my brain. It seams wrong that this is all just the arbitrary outcome of the unthinking machinations of chance. I would like to think that in my love of nature I find some sense of spirituality - some transcendent order in the experience of natural beauty and its mind-boggling complexity. But to borrow Sylvia Plath's line, "I talk to God but the sky is empty." There's the rub. In speaking to Christianity, one of my friends put it well when he said, "The Bible is a great book, just like Moby Dick." So my idea of spirituality in nature is . . . it is far too late and I'm far too sick tonight to be chasing that white whale. Not that my own conclusions hold much weight of their own - I find that the best thing I can do now is to borrow from the wisdom of others. | | |
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