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."