humanity

in all of time coming and going

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

from the forthcoming collection, Wait/Loss, this is “Sentence ’86”:

in all of time coming and going, whatever’s next and long before now, before this millennium, or the last, before the Dark Ages, before Jesus, Christ, even before time, we share these years, you and I, this splinter of nanoseconds as we tumble through space in this brief awareness, together, share these histories, these stories, that pandemic, that eruption, the wars, the towers tumbling, the time we stayed up all night looking at stars, and the time we said goodbye that hot summer day, that was us back then, over there, when somehow we got caught onto each other as the accident of now determined that in all of everything that ever was and might be somehow we should share this present, hooked, for just a while, then not, and billions of others and billions more were, are, and will be, so you have to know that the chances remain incomprehensible that we might ever collide at all, leaving pieces of each other in the other’s pockets to carry on some wayward journey through space, and, then, gone again, evaporated into that eternal foreverness of nevermore, so brief, so tragically beautiful yet sadistically brief is this whirlwind of now, so I must wonder what the odds are in the vastness of this expanding thought, that we’d collide yet again, so that here we are, somehow

Stardust

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

Let’s start with this creepy little statistic: Every single day, one-hundred tons of meteorite dust coats the entire planet. You, me, the cars, buildings, everywhere, everything. It is so miniscule, of course, that we don’t even know it is happening, preferring instead to wait for the Leonid shower, or the Perseid, the Geminid, or even the Urid, to run outside and watch shooting stars every twenty or thirty seconds on a clear moonless night. Who isn’t transfixed by that? No one says, “Hey, I’m covered in microscopic meteor dust; make a wish!” But equally, who isn’t freaked out by the thought of meteor dust in their hair? On their ice cream cone?

This Earth of ours is at its core about ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit, exactly the same as the surface of the sun. Symmetry aside, one has to wonder if The Great Thermometer simply stops tracking at 10K. Also, Earth is the only planet not named for a God, and as crazy as this seems, no one knows who named it, though the etymological roots are Germanic and Old English. As for age, Scientists–the ones who know what they’re talking about because of generations of research–say the planet is about 4.5 billion years old, but humans of any sort have only been here for about 450,000 years. Some traditions and faiths call the start date around six thousand years ago. Either way, the human portion of earth hasn’t been here that long and isn’t staying long enough to wear out our welcome. It seems the earth is cleansing herself.

Since the onset of the Covid pandemic, this planet has shed about three thousand humans per day. That’s a 911 every single day. We are improving, but we are doing it on a very slippery slope. Why? Well, we’ve so adjusted for life to be “convenient” (think Smart Phone, think 5G, think online everything, think curbside, think Drive-thru, think Alexa, think Lunchables), that too many believe if some aspect of life is inconvenient, they’ll simply redefine reality to accommodate what they want, even if it chips away at Earth’s patience.

We’ve traded the rare beauty of this one-of-a-kind globe for “whatever’s easier.” The percolator becomes Mr. Coffee becomes a Keurig. It’s easier. We are completely, arguably, most definitively reliant upon the 2500 operational satellites orbiting the earth (about 6000 actually are orbiting, but more than half simply don’t work–how inconvenient). So here’s the thing: According to scientists who know what they’re talking about and constantly work on and adjust the Asteroid-Satellite Collision Probability, when a meteor or other such space object hits a satellite, the rock “vaporizes into hot, electrically charged gas that can short out circuits and damage electronics, causing the satellite to spin out of control.” Don’t worry about being hit–it’ll burn up on reentry into the planet’s atmosphere. No, that’s not the problem.

See the problem? Yes, no more satellite.

And if a large such space rock plays pinball with Space X’s system of communication, we here are earth are, as they might say on “Eureka,” simply fracked. And if one of them or a flock of them zero in on the Great Siberian Forest setting it ablaze, we are, once again, Stardust, part of the atmosphere, that naked-to-the-eye coating which exploded countless zeros away from here several billion years ago, arriving, now, on our chocolate swirl cone.

The greatest scientists in the world who know what they’re talking about have trouble wrapping their minds around this simple idea: We, Earth, are an anomaly, God’s only child. Even if you believe somewhere in the deep recesses of unthinkable distance are planets with lifeforms playing Scrabble and drinking Pinot Noir, astrophysicists like Stephen Hawking, Neil Tyson, Carl Sagan, and Brian May can’t tell you where, and they’ve looked with equipment so advanced some of it has left the solar system, some landed on moving asteroids, and some is scooping up dirt like a dog-walker in Central Park and bringing it back. Then they study it, then they tell us they still don’t know.

But they can tell us around 100 tons of meteorite dust coats the earth, and us, daily.

I walked to the river earlier. Unplugged and, to be honest, uninterested in much. The day started poorly but finished really strong, but still I felt like going for a long walk in the mountains or sitting on the sand at the gulf, quietly. Instead, here I am, more than a little content to look out at a distant bridge and watch the cars and trucks cross the mile and a half reach headed North, up toward DC, up toward New York, up, just further and further up, perhaps as far as the northern stretch of Ontario to watch the Northern Lights bounce across time. But closer, near me on the river, some bufflehead ducks surfaced and dove again. Watermen on a workboat checked traps.

See, it is information like this that makes me aware of why when a student asks me about subject-verb agreement I’m wondering why we can only see about 2000-3000 stars, not “millions” as we feel when standing at the bay on a clear, moonless night. And my frustration at knowing I have so much I want to see, so many glasses of wine to drink with friends in European pubs and small quaint villages, brings me to the brink of psychosis when someone actually screws up simple comma rules. Part of me wants to say, “Come on! This isn’t rocket science! It’s a fracking comma, for God’s sake!” but in the past few years, a stronger part of me, a more conscious part, wants to whisper, “You’re doing fine. It’s just commas–I knew what you meant. Now go outside and bathe in the miracle of meteorite dust. Buy a cone and wait for it.”

We’ve drifted too far astray from the essential, so far afield from what matters.

We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Planetmates

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

An old dilapidated house near my home dates to the seventeen hundreds. It sits in the middle of what was once a slave plantation. Just across the land long ago gone were the slave quarters. Today the house is covered by vines and trees; some dying themselves after a century of life. Generations of neighbors have come and gone, and generations of foliage and storms and crops have come and gone and what’s left of the house crumbles into the earth.

Some say let it crumble; some say tear it down and build a new place on the land and give it to the slaves’ descendants, many of whom still live on the same road; oppressed people either stay close to home or never come back.

When I walk past I am painfully aware that I shared this space, separated only by time, with people who whipped men and women, others who were whipped and shackled. This isn’t a movie; it isn’t even history when you stand on the muddy lane at the end of the path and look toward the once-was porch and picture a fine-dressed overseer ordering humans to commit inhumane acts. This is where I live. We live. My family on the Island and my friends on the Gulf Coast all live here too; just beyond reach, a little off the calendar.

In my time, since my arrival, I’ve breathed in and out at the same time as Mother Theresa and Malcolm X. Neil Armstrong. Jimi Hendrix. Pope Paul the Sixth. Lech Walesa. St. John Paul the Second. Thomas Merton. President Eisenhower. Elvis. Pablo Picasso. Albert Schweitzer.

Wait.

Rwandan Tutsi’s. The Lost Boys of Sudan. Steven Biko. Pol Pot and Treyvon Martin.

I did time with these people; I stood witness to these events. These saints and sinners brushed my sleeve simply by sharing the earth on my watch. We have a loose affiliation with miracles and massacres as if life wasn’t less timeless than it is; but we’re just guests here.

This world is at best a hotel, and every once in awhile I take a look at the register to remind myself who else stayed here. Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Mohammed, Ivan the Terrible, Genghis Khan, all guests just over the slope of the horizon, just beyond some small slice of linear measure. On the same human trajectory as mine but before is Geronimo, Moses, Jesus, Christ think about the gentle bend of time, the careening swerve of place that separates me from the Disciples, the Visigoths, the founding fathers. All here but just before.

My swift life falls on the roll call as Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway. And when that shack in the woods around the corner from my home was still in its prime, the walls still absorbing the shrieks of rape, the cries of bleeding men, Grandma Moses was a toddler. Grandma Moses, who painted her last work about the time I learned to swim. I was alive when someone was alive who was alive during the Civil War.

Closer to now, when I look inside the lines of my coming and going, between those two rays shooting off from my birth and my death, I can see the souls who at one time or another shared with me this spinning blue wad. Not short of miraculous, we claim the same particles of stardust, and that’s what keeps me looking around when I walk down some city street; I want to know who on earth is with me.

Carl Jung lectured during my youth, and Ty Cobb watched the same Mets players as me. When I was still cutting new teeth and outgrowing my Keds, I could have headed downtown with my Dad and possibly been on the same train as William Faulkner, e.e. cumming or Marilyn Monroe. I might have passed them on the street, maybe stood in line at some drug store counter with my mom and behind us because of the blending of circumstance might have been Sylvia Plath or Sam Cooke; Nat King Cole; Otis Redding. We have overlapping lives. On a Venn Graph, we share the shaded space.

If my family had gone for a drive the summer I turned eight and stopped to get a room in Memphis instead of the Poconos, we would have heard the shot that killed King. And in ’63, I was the same age, same small height as John-John and could have stood next to him, shoulder to shoulder, to salute his dad’s coffin.

Judy Garland and I watched the New York Jets in Super Bowl Three. When I was born, World War One vets weren’t yet senior citizens and World War Two Vets were in their thirties. Vietnam isn’t history to me; it is my childhood, my early teens. The fall of Saigon was announced over the loud speakers at my high school.

There are empty fields save monuments and markers where soldiers died defending this land against the British, against ourselves, and at some point before their demise they stood where I stand and watched the hazy sun rise. Same sun; same beach. Don’t mistake history for “back then.” Those people just happened to check out before us. It could have been us. It is us now. And it won’t be long before our lives overlap with the crying call of a newborn Einstein. Did you see that boy running at the park? That girl climbing the tree at her home? Did I just pass by some senator, some Cicero or Socrates, some St Augustine? Now is the only history we know firsthand.

I find it a crime we are not incessantly aware we were preceded by the likes of ancient civilizations, but also by evil. For God’s sake, Eichmann and I did common time, Hitler was my grandfather’s age; so was Stalin.  But so was Isak Dineson and Winston Churchill. My grandfather lived into my youth, yet was born before flight, about the time of the first automobile, before radio, and before long some sweet woman and man will find each other softly adding to who comes next.

Like strangers buying the same house decades before and after, like seeing the list of who owned the used car, like getting a job replacing some retiree. Like standing in line. Like sour-dough starter. Like a relay race.

I like knowing the people I know now, these brothers and sisters, whose overlapping lives linger just within my time frame; we share the same air, watch the same news and celebrate the same wins. In some divine book somewhere, these people and I are on the same page. My parents, my siblings, my children, my God what grace to have shared this passage from cradle to grave.

And you, there, reading this; we’ve shared wine and we’ve laughed together, disappeared, collided, and sat quietly and finished each others’ sighs–what are the…I mean, is it even possible to figure the odds and calculate the multitudes of humans in these millennia that I might even know your name?