The Author to a Work in Progress
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The Author Speaks to a Work in Progress
Thou cursed manuscript, I pursue thee as Ahab chased Moby Dick. You torment me in my dreams and torture me with half-completed thoughts. With a flick of your tail, you splash me with inspiration and vanish into the abyss.
I sharpen my pencils, miniature harpoons, and fling them at the page, only to find that scattered thoughts have lost all coherence. And yet a pattern emerges, and off to the publisher it goes.
A phantom fish collides and breaks the timbers of my boat. The horrid wreck sinks as I bob in waves and cling to flotsam. I swim ashore to begin again.
A Unity of Minds
Could a mockingbird mimic the strains of “Jupiter: Bringer of Joviality,” or any other section of “The Planets,” that set of tone poems composed by Gustav Holst? Imagine the morose tune of “Mars: Bringer of War” issuing from the throat of a bird. Though such complex mimicry may be beyond the abilities of birds, animals frequently amaze and amuse us with their behavior, which can be mistaken for antics.
Why do these behaviors hold such charm for us? Is it the recognition of personal triumphs and foibles when we look at them? We see ourselves in their behavior, and even their anatomy. The bones of a bird’s wing are those of a human hand, revealed in the glow of an X-ray. The same is true of a whale’s flipper, which moves them through the ocean in tandem with the thrust of the tail.
Our assessment of animals is often inaccurate. We gasp when hearing of how a captive killer whale, incarcerated for years, bit more than the “feeding hand” and took the life of its keeper. Intelligent beings, they learn tricks rapidly, but intelligence makes them dangerous captives. For millennia, killer whales have survived in ocean currents, but escape becomes a “current event.”
We forget that they are killers, able to take a seal or a man in a fast attack. Charm ends here, for they have become too much like us. We too kill to survive. Whether dining on wild-harvested venison or range-fed beef, we sacrifice other lives on the altar of our continued existence.
These intelligent captives are always a danger. They are not meant to perform for our amusement, let alone on a regular schedule. We will only make peace with our animal neighbors when we see them in us as we see ourselves in them.
Meditation on an Abstract Painting
From whence came those faces? Perhaps a story by Thurber, whose fiction is as surreal as these paintings. One nose curves to the left and another to the right. One face appears to wink as another smiles broadly. Below it, a disembodied ear.
One morning, a door opened into an alternate universe, and I passed through. I have made many friends here, but it is not home. Background checks reveal nothing of my existence before 1990 because I was not here.
Occasionally, I see someone whom I remember from home, somewhere through a porthole in the space-time continuum. We never speak of our origins.