Thursday, July 07, 2022

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."

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