The Blessing of Olfactory Hallucination

 As the group gathered itself by way of a shared meditation, the person guiding it invited us to hold our own hands and picture us holding one another's hands. I closed my eyes and imagined us as a group huddled close together, breathing the same air. 

I felt the heat and closeness of such a gathering.

I smelled it.

There is a pleasant animal smell produced by a close gathering of human bodies. For obvious reasons, I have not smelled it in a very long time. In that moment, I smelled it.

I must thank the leader of the meditation for that.

The Magic Eight-Ball says: "Giving thanks is always in order."

It Is All One Thing

 

“It is all one thing.”

I couldn’t tell who had said it. Literally, it could have been me. The way we were all huddled together, our bodies touching, breathing one another’s air, smelling one another’s bodies, it was difficult to tell where one person ended and another began, if that term actually meant anything.

There’s a wonderful animal smell that is generated by multiple human bodies huddled close together, their scents and their exhalations mingled. It’s a beautifully comforting smell that’s not like anything else, not like the smell of being in a close space by yourself or the smell of intimacy between two people. The smell of communion.

At some point, the spell broke, and we began by an unspoken agreement to move apart. The breaking of the communion was as much a proof of its existence as anything that had happened while we were together. I looked around the group, at the friends and co-workers and the friends’ parents and children, thinking about the range in ages among us, which I knew to be from eight to eighty-two, and felt an added delight in that span of time. This was my idea of a utopian society, a community where people came together at all ages. So different from the segregation of race and age and gender that Ernest Callenbach imagined in his novel Ecotopia, where children went away to boarding schools and old people went away to group homes (and eventually to the equivalent of ice floes), while ethnic groups “voluntarily” or sometimes not-so-voluntarily isolated themselves to keep things tidy and keep his imaginary utopia blandly white and youthful and suspiciously able-bodied.

Qurum said, “Did anyone else hear someone say, ‘It is all one thing’?”

“Of course,” Daniel’s father said. “I’m not sure who said it, but it was perfectly distinct. I didn’t think there was any chance it was hallucinatory. Did it sound odd to you, dear?”

“Kind of. It seemed sort of…distant, like it might be coming from outside the group, so I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it.”

“No, it was real,” Carl said. “So, who said it?”

Then Aaron signed, [It came to me, too.]

Everyone was quiet for a bit after that.

 

 

 

https://poets.org/poem/hymn-time

The Magic Eight-Ball Says: "It is all one thing."

She Requires You To Be Beautiful

 

“Nature has certain characteristics which are consistent at all scales, from the microscopic to the cosmic. She displays a clear preference for symmetry over asymmetry, for elegance over complexity, for consistency over peculiarity. She requires you to be beautiful, since you are a part of nature.”

“And as I am a part of nature, it is clear that my own nature, greatly though you may struggle with it, is also a part of nature’s symmetry, elegance, consistency and beauty, even if you are unable to perceive it.”

“So now you are claiming to be part of nature, and acting in accordance with nature, when every action you are performing is contrary to her?”

“Yes. Everything I am doing is in accordance with my own internal nature, and is my own effort to collaborate with the laws of nature to bring my body and my life into conformity with my inner nature. Exactly so.”

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard you say, and I’ve never heard you say anything but absurdities. You’ve been at war with nature from the moment you decided to reject your true sex.”

“You’re the one who is rejecting my true sex. I’m trying to approach it, with nature’s help. You’re trying to keep me from doing so, with the force of law, but all you can manage is to make my efforts more difficult. Even if you succeed, all you will do is limit my options in seeking help. You won’t be able to change my true nature. That’s the thing you can’t seem to get through your thick skull.

“If I were living a hundred years ago, all I would be able to do is choose what clothes I wore and train my voice, and that would have to be enough. I’m fortunate to be living now, when medicine is more advanced. I’m unfortunate enough to not be living a hundred years from now when medicine will be able to allow people like me to make a perfect transition, and when, God willing, there will be fewer people like you to make life miserable for us. But here and now, I’ll do what I can.”

 

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Md481yOun50W4wpoWN8um_oRkMeEZOA2k8-tPmkApL4/edit?usp=sharing

The Magic Eight-Ball says: "To thine own self be true."

Breathing

 

At the end of the play, the executioner walks onstage and pulls off his mask. It’s Everyman again. He holds his hands to his chest and says, “I’m breathing. It’s good to breathe. If you want to keep on breathing, don’t make trouble – or if you must, make the kind of trouble they expect.”

Such is the “moral”, so to speak, of A Man For All Seasons. We have watched how Sir Thomas More was humiliated, imprisoned and finally executed, becoming a martyr to his conscience and his faith. All through it, Everyman has watched each stage of the story, pointing out how Sir Thomas is making life difficult for himself, how much easier he would have things, if only he would co-operate with the people in authority over him. In the end, of course, he cannot and will not endorse what he believes is wrong, and dies for it. His reward is a place in history, of course, as well as sainthood (it has been observed more than once that Utopia is the only science fiction novel written by a canonized saint), but in life he still suffers and he still dies, and as in the play, Everyman just wants to go on breathing.

Well, that’s not quite true. There are many other things Everyman wants. But there are very few things he wants anything like as much as he wants to go on breathing. It takes something tremendous to get Everyman to put his life, or his freedom, or even, really, his convenience, at risk. Something tremendous, and then, often as not, something tremendous but stupid, tremendous but exactly the wrong thing, or at the very least something tremendous but trite.

So Henry keeps changing the rules, and Everyman wants to go on breathing, and the hard part isn’t even facing the axe: it’s facing the years of humiliation, loss of friends and hardship that come before. Those are usually enough to turn the average Thomas into an Everyman. Only a few of us manage to be something more.

 

 

https://janicefalls.wordpress.com/2019/09/12/ancient-language-by-hannah-stephenson/

 

[One of the members of the group observed, “Breathing is the first thing they ask, ‘Is she breathing?’ and it’s the last thing they ask.” Having watched breath leave the body more than once (but once, especially), I really felt that.]

The Magic Eight-Ball says: "It takes more than breath to make life."

I Hear You

 

“I hear you”, I replied. It seemed like an inadequate response, but on the other hand, it was the truth, and the easiest of all my complicated reactions to express, one that I could send quickly instead of allowing the silence to stretch. I could send a longer reply in a moment. I thought it would be better to at least say, “I hear you” first. Painfully, I was reminded of the advice to “Get your first shot off fast, to rattle him. Aim carefully with the second.” Not at all an appropriate thought for this moment, and evidence of how badly my youthful reading had prepared me for this moment, but I would try my best.

As it happened, though, she immediately replied, “Thank you. That, more than anything, is what I need right now, to be heard. Not even to be believed, but to be heard.”

“I do believe you, conditionally at least. I wasn’t there, obviously, but I don’t have any reason to doubt you. I’m not going to play the game of ‘Are you sure you didn’t misinterpret his meaning?’ or ‘Wasn’t he really just being friendly?’. I’m really sorry that this happened to you.”

“Thank you.”

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

“You’ve already done it. Seriously. Let’s talk about Frankenstein’s Arboretum.”

So, we did. After that real-life nightmare she had just described to me, we talked about an elaborate, stylized, imaginary nightmare that we had both enjoyed, and speculated on how it might be adapted into a computer game, incorporating the various scenes which had been cut for the sake of running time. She even invented a new horror that I thought was quite ingenious, and which would have fit perfectly into the film (though it probably also would have been cut for running time).

We went on from there to discuss an old idea of hers, of a DVD which would consist entirely of deleted scenes form a film which didn’t exist at all, so people could speculate on what the film itself might be like.

I knew she would need counseling for what had happened to her, but I didn’t press her on it. In a couple of weeks, I would ask her if she was in therapy, but I’d be cautious about raising the subject.

 

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Tv1RJDhY3_zOE2Y48LmUhb6d1KxV2rGGMt_WAwSWFHE/edit?usp=sharing

The Magic Eight-Ball Says, "Sometimes, 'I hear you' is all you really need to say'."

Where Memories Are Kept

 I wish I had a place in my brain were memories were kept, secure and reliably stored, as in a digital recording.

Instead, I have a strange, unreliable holographic mechanism in which what is recorded degrades if it is not consulted...but is also degraded if it is consulted frequently, its details tending to become replaced by imaginary ones, its blanks filled in with fragments of unrelated memories.

Some people have trained their memories for greater rigor, and others are supposedly born with a natural ability to recall minute details with precision. All I know is that I don't have such a memory. I have a fairly typical memory, one which fades and fuzzes and only contains fragments and shards as I look backward.

If I had a convenient implant, though -- if I could replace one or two of my skull bones or vertebrae with substitutes made of cross-linked diamond so they were simultaneously data storage cores and also harder and more resilient than natural bone (I might as well go for top-of-the line unobtainium) -- I would be able to store my memories in a reliable form and not have to count on the tricky, dubious phenomenon or epiphenomenon of human memory. 

I would be something different from human in that case. Would I be better or worse? I do think I would be better. If I had possessed such a memory, I would have been able to avoid many of the confusions, doubts and torments that plagued my life, at work and in private. I could have avoided many traps and follies that resulted from distortions of memory, including some which I seem to have manufactured intentionally.

One day, people will have the option to improve their memories with this sort of technology. At first it will be used to help people with severe disabilities. Eventually, it will be available to everyone. Yes, I do wish it were available now. Oh, well.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42548/wasteful-gesture-only-not

What Songs Travel Toward Us

 

I sat on the roof with my guitar, plucking at it. I wondered what the people passing by thought of me: was I a lazy bum, idling away my evening? Was I a hard-working man unwinding after a long shift at the factory or the office? Was I a slightly overaged student, taking a break from studying some esoteric point of paramecium anatomy or Venetian law?

Probably none of them thought I looked like a hard-working man who didn’t especially like his job, sitting at the office engaged at his work. There it was, though. I had long since reconciled myself to the fact that as a singer I would never be more than a fairly decent amateur who would be tolerated at a coffee shop or a Saturday market. The only way I was going to make a living in music was as a songwriter, grinding out tunes for other people to perform, much better than I ever could.

I could write music at a pretty fast pace, fast enough to bring in enough to live on. I did better when I allowed myself time to let the music come to me, though, instead of chasing after it. If I just sat here like this, comfortable on an afternoon in late May, and plucked at my old acoustic Sitting Bull (because if I ever got into a fight, he was sturdy enough to use as “a coup stick”), there was no telling what songs might travel toward me.

Besides that, it felt better to just leave myself open for creation. It was the best feeling in the world when a song came and sat in my lap and said, “Play me”, or tapped me on the shoulder and said, “It’s time I was played.”

So here I sat, plucking and listening and waiting. I’d give it another ten minutes, and then I’d begin grinding out unrequited teen love for Chicken Clock 

 

https://onbeing.org/poetry/cross-that-line/

The Magic Eight Ball says, "Cross that line."

Unborn

 “It’s strange. For the most part, she had a very good memory, but she remembered quite vividly something which couldn’t possibly have happened: going out on the playing field of her high school with her science class with a radio to listen to the beeping of Sputnik I as it passed over Portland, Oregon. The reason it couldn’t have happened as she remembered it is that she was graduated from high school in 1955, and when the first satellite in history was launched in October of 1957, she was married and living in California. Very odd.”

“Okay, that’s an odd thing to misremember. And her memory had enough details that it couldn’t have been something different?”

“Right. She remembered her science teacher and her classmates, the playing field, and so on, and she remembered the excitement of hearing about the launch, how none of her classmates were frightened or angry that ‘they’, the Soviets, had done it first, only delight that ‘we’, humanity, had done it. And it was definitely a satellite passing overhead, it really couldn’t be anything else, the way she described setting up the radio. Puzzling.”

“It really does sound as though she went to high school in some other universe.”

“There was one other memory which really disturbed me, because we remembered it differently, except this one was so personal and private that I had no way of demonstrating it to her the way I could show her documents that proved the first satellite was launched in 1957. I remember vividly how, early in our relationship, she began bleeding vaginally, and her doctor told her she was suffering a failed pregnancy and needed to have a D&C immediately or she would eventually bleed to death. He asked me to leave the room and she emerged about half an hour later telling me that it had been a rather unpleasant procedure, and rather messy, and that she had gotten through it all right and was glad to have spared me having to watch it.

“I mentioned it years later, and she said nothing of the sort had ever happened to her, and she couldn’t possibly have been mistaken, since she would of course remember it. I made the mistake of arguing the point with her, and it put a strain on our relationship for some time.

“Unfortunately, since we never talked about it with anyone else, and the doctor himself retired and left town, there was no-one I could talk with about it, even to satisfy myself that it had really happened. A mutual friend mentioned the incident recently, but it turned out that it had been something I had said about it, so I can’t even count that. Frustrating.”

“So even in a relationship as close as the one the two of you had, you still lived in different worlds.”

“Apparently.”

https://wordsfortheyear.com/2014/03/13/the-name-of-a-fish-by-faith-shearin/

The Magic Eight-Ball says: "Happy 84th birthday, Kathe."

Duckies

 It was a running gag in the household for some time, the portentous voiceover from a satire of those "mysteries of pseudoscience" TV shows: "Ducks. What are they? Where do they come from? Why are they here? What do they want?"

Today, while vainly searching for straws in the compartment between seats in the car, Gideon pulled up a tiny Ziploc bag containing miniature rubber duckies.

Immediately, I pondered the question: why did the car not have the stash of straws it ought to have, and why did it instead have an emergency supply of duckies?

Gideon made the careful observation that they were both hippie ducks, a boy and a girl hippie duck, as we bantered back and forth on the subject.

Suddenly, as we waited for the Wendy's servers to produce our drinks, I realized what they were: a pair of cake toppers which Kathe had bought and tucked away for me to find and coo over. Exactly the sort of sweet, sappy thing she would do. Or that I would do, but I'm pretty sure I didn't, so it must have been Kathe.

Thanks, Sweetie.

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Kathe lives you. That won't change."

A Letter From Kathe

 The other day, I received a call from the Reynolds Law Firm, which has handled our legal business in various matters over the years, telling me that they had a letter which they needed to either return to me or shred in order to protect my confidentiality. I was fairly certain that it wasn't anything with current relevance, but was still curious, so I went by and picked it up.

I was glad that I did. It was good to have a little reminder of Kathe's quietly fierce intellect in my hand for a moment. In the midst of our (valiant and energetic, though ultimately failed) effort to save our home from the hostile attentions of the City of Corvallis, Kathe gave a member of the city's bureaucracy a piece of her mind, and it was a pleasure to have it back.

Mr. W****:

Since we talked with you, I have continued to try to find a way to work on our decrepit outbuildings in a way that would satisfy the city. However, it doesn't seem that there is any such thing. I have continued to call and where possible interview people who might assist us with the work that (in my opinion) needs to be done. I was keeping a running account of my efforts but have decided to simply summarize them. At this time I have spoken with a small family business which will undertake to clear the debris from the yard and with a fencing contractor that I feel sure would do a good job. I have not yet found someone who would be willing to drop plans that would be acceptable to the city, but I have made some progress toward that end.

Over the past weekend, I looked at my notes and decided that since I had gotten no callbacks from any structural engineer, my next effort would be to call on them unannounced and see if anyone would talk to me. Yesterday, I spoke with Mr. David Flemings of Clair, who said he would look into the situation and see what advice he could give us. We happily accepted.

This morning, a couple of city representatives appeared on our porch and asked me to sign a paper that they mischaracterized as a vitally necessary permission for them to start hiring contractors to demolish our property on our behalf. They referred to the paper as permission to "abate or demolish" but as my husband pointed out to them, it really said "abate by demolition". They again referred to "your dangerous house" (I am so getting tired of that phrase). I signed, but I checked " Do Not (agree)" and they went away.

This is what we want:

First, agreement to our plan for remediation. We want to remove the part of the auxiliary structure that rests on decaying timbers, to retain the garage and later to put a foundation under the garage walls and to and to restore the back stairway and porch to a usable condition.

Second, permission to do some work ourselves now, or as soon as conditions permit. This would include clearance of some, if not all, of the debris in the yard. It would also include restoring the steps to the stairway (the one that is so very attractive to "small children"), rebuilding the porch, and replacing the door, if we can find one that will fit the space.

Third, to be allowed to enter the garage, both to clear debris and to work on the roof, and later, to use it to store yard equipment, tools, and materials, while the rest of the work proceeds.

Fourth, to be addressed as people with a problem (and one which arguably the city ought to have helped us with from the start), not people who are a problem. In short, we want the city's people to speak with us politely and honestly, and without bullying.

5th, if they know of contractors who would be willing to work with us, as opposed to contractors who are willing to work with the city, that they give us their names.

Kathleen and John Burt

If the city had dealt with us in a reasonable and decent fashion, that lovely old house would still be standing and I might well still be living in it. The house at the corner of 10^th and Jefferson could be a showpiece of the community instead of an empty socket in the city's jaw.

And couples would still be getting their pictures taken under the branches of the cedar tree arching over the sidewalk.

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Look and see."

I'm Here To Tell You

 

“I’m here to tell you…” his voice echoed from the amplifiers, distorted by the walls of the buildings on the plaza and the gathered bodies and by the weird electronics they used on this timeline, “that people don’t have to live this way. I have seen alternatives, other ways of living, and I know they are possible. We don’t have to live under this regime that oppresses us, we don’t have to fear one another, we don’t have to hide away and only dare to speak our minds once a month for five minutes. There is another way to live, and I have seen it!”

I doubted he had, but he still had my attention. After all, if he had actually jumped timelines or even viewed, he would be worth recruiting.

“I have walked the streets of this city and seen people walking proudly and free, speaking their minds freely on every corner, not just in this one plaza in this one hour a month. I have seen people greet one another with the handclasp of equal to equal, unafraid, not with the servile salute of lesser to better. I have seen children playing in parks, dressed in bright colors, like the flowers of Springtime, not marching like soldiers in the drab colors of school uniforms. I have seen it, and I know we can live that way, too!”

He was almost in tears. He had clearly seen something that had affected him deeply. I definitely needed to speak with him and get some details out of him.

“We can remake our society to make that kind of life possible! We can be free! W can-“ His microphone cut off with a flatulent squawk which I had always suspected was intentionally irritating, as a way of punishing people who ran out their allotted time.

The next speaker stepped up to the microphone. I was already pushing through the crowd, trying to reach the man before he slipped away.

The Magic Eight-Ball says: "Speak up."

 

https://improvisedlife.com/2020/10/26/how-to-redeem-lifes-spoilers-andy-goldsworthy-and-hala-alyan/

Imperfections

 

“It’s surprising just how chilling it can be to see a small area of fresh grass and trees.”

“Knowing that there were dozens of tents pitched there a week ago?”

“Yes. All those people, swept away in that police sweep that was so widely touted and so widely celebrated, everybody rejoicing in the big police sweep that was going to sweep the nasty unhoused population away, sweep, sweep, sweep.”

“Yes. It gives you a taste of what it feels like to see the results of genocide.”

“There. That’s exactly what I was thinking. This tidy, ever-so-appealing space, rendered clean and neat, with no trace left of what was there before to trouble the minds of people visiting. Someone arriving from out of town, who didn’t know the camp had been there, would have no idea that the unhoused people had even existed.”

“Even knowing that the people who lived here aren’t dead, that they were just kicked out and hustled off down the road, doesn’t make that much difference. They’ve been erased from where they were, from where they were living.”

“It’s not as though they wanted to live in squalor, shivering in filthy tents in the middle of Winter in Oregon. But they were here.”

“And now they’re gone, and there’s no trace of their existence.”

“An imperfection, down the memory hole.”

“There are plaques all over town, commemorating historic events. There should be more of them, marking even things that people don’t want to remember.”

“I remember hearing about a group in California putting up markers in honor of bordellos and speakeasies, but a group recording the former locations of encampments, yes. I like it.”

Today’s prompt, “imperfections, comes from the poem, “Palimpsest”, by Thomas R. Moore: https://tmoore419.wixsite.com/poet

The Magic Eight-Ball says: "Nothing to see here."