briefest moments can
have explosive power that
overwhelm the times
Back to Jim Harrison, but then I am driving to work so Mr. Harrison is much on my mind when I sit down at me desk.
In the sometimes painful book True North (Grove Press, 2005), Mr. Harrison writes:
The easily perceptible linear thread through our lives causes a basic misunderstanding when we tend to give the same weight to years, months, and days.
The briefest moments can have an explosive power that overwhelms the time around them including what preceded them.
It occurred to me that my own point of view was unique on earth but this was not a comforting idea. Wherever I stood and looked I was the only one there.
The easily perceptible linear thread I thought was very good especially on a warm humid morning in January in the Low Country of South Carolina.
I drove the east towards the ocean into a thick fog bank that reduced my world to about 10 feet in front of me and 10 feet behind.
Nothing was easily perceptible.
Everything was hidden, even the great Atlantic Ocean that covers 20 percent of the earth’s surface.
I got to work and parked in the quiet of a gray, wet morning in January in a summer resort town.
Quiet.
But there was this sound in the background as I walked the path to my office.
I couldn’t place it.
I figured out that through some freak of acoustics in the fog, I could hear the ocean.
Couldn’t see it, but I could hear it.
Moments that can change lives can cause a basic misunderstanding when we tend to give the same weight to years, months, and days.
Our own point of view is unique on earth.
Wherever you stand and look, you are the only one there.
But keep in mind this.
In one of Anthony Bourdain (if there was ever a literary complimentary combination like that of bacon with eggs it would be Bourdain and Harrison) shows, Mr. Bourdain spent the day with taggers, those folks who decorate subway cars in New York City.
These fellers described how they would paint a car in a certain pattern and then sit in a certain location with their buddies, a place were their point of view was unique on earth, and wait for hours and hours for that specific car with that specific pattern to come by.
Sometimes, when a train with car showed up, it would be going the wrong way and the pattern would be on the side away from that their point of view was unique on earth.
The briefest moments can have an explosive power that overwhelms the time around them including what preceded them.
And sometimes, those moments are facing the wrong way.
The truly goofy part of my illustration of the taggers is that THEY KNOW they missed the moment as they say the other side of the car.
How many moments, explosive moments, come and go, never revealed.
Can you march to a different drummer when you don’t hear the drum?
Lots of thoughts for a foggy morning.
To be honest, I just liked the painting Mr. Harrison did with his words.
I continued down the beach past the path to my tourist cabin toward the estuary of the Sucker River a mile or two distant. The moon’s sheen on the water followed me as I walked for reasons not clear to me. It occurred to me that my own point of view was unique on earth but this was not a comforting idea. Wherever I stood and looked I was the only one there. The few sounds of the village diminished, and I mostly heard my feet in the damp sand, and then a loon call ahead in the estuarine area. To the left far out in Lake Superior the lights of a freighter made their slow passage to the west. I heard a coyote out on a forested promontory called Lonesome Point and single dog.
No Haiku For You 