desert mountains
Many years and decades later…
he sits atop a sand colored, house-sized pile of rocks which is itself perched, rather regally, he’ll think, atop a scrub pine- and bouler-strewn promontory situated three-quarters up the side of an 11,000 foot mountain. His relative insignificance, driven home and made perceptibly real by the mass upon mass upon which he perches, feels curiously comforting as the sun melts into the boiling heat waves of a horizon a hundred miles west. In his mind, superimposed upon this blue and yellow and rose canvas, he sees his own life inching forward at a glacial pace as though a course on a tattered map—a course which he alone will chart, which he alone will track, to its end. Wherever that may be, he’ll wonder again and again.
A course which, though tandem at times—paralleling the lives of his nuclear circle—is nonetheless a solo journey. As all courses are, he’ll muse. I am my course. I am what I am. A ray? A line? A plane? All these? None of these? A single line on the page, wandering to and fro, back’n forth, yet always moving from beginning to end. Or vice versa, he’ll guess more or less correctly.
The sun’s equator dipping below the horizon, he feels a whisper of a cool breeze on his neck and feels the goose bumps on his bare arms as he watches his life’s map become desiccate and crumble like ancient oak leaves suddenly heaved skyward by the churning gusts of a stormfront.
He’ll look up and stare, as on that bluing canvas the first stars began to materialize overhead, and watch the renewing winds vaporize and carry off into the void the sum total of his life’s journey; and the chart with it; and he becomes one again with the Om. With the Cosmos.
He wonders silently as the arctic pole of the solar disk sinks reluctantly into a sea which is somewhere off beyond the vantage of his eagle’s nest, yet whose salty smell will ever be there at the ready when called upon.
He wonders how different, really, are we: from the computers which we create…in our own image. And, for that matter, how different: from the gods which created us…in their own image.
The rose fades to pink, the lavender to blue; the night bloomers somewhere down there in the creeping darkness of the oasis spread their velvety wings and soak up the universe of dark matter as it flows by like so many dust motes in a photonegative. Above, the blazing pinpoints (with each their own army of theoretical angels singing praises to their masters) flicker like Christmas lights viewed from the mountain top.
…in their own image, he thinks. And he watches as the answer fractalizes and spirals inward—toward some hopeful vanishing point out just beyond the memory of that bubbling horizon—spinning into the singularity into which all questions must eventually fall into in order to be answered.
he sits atop a sand colored, house-sized pile of rocks which is itself perched, rather regally, he’ll think, atop a scrub pine- and bouler-strewn promontory situated three-quarters up the side of an 11,000 foot mountain. His relative insignificance, driven home and made perceptibly real by the mass upon mass upon which he perches, feels curiously comforting as the sun melts into the boiling heat waves of a horizon a hundred miles west. In his mind, superimposed upon this blue and yellow and rose canvas, he sees his own life inching forward at a glacial pace as though a course on a tattered map—a course which he alone will chart, which he alone will track, to its end. Wherever that may be, he’ll wonder again and again.
A course which, though tandem at times—paralleling the lives of his nuclear circle—is nonetheless a solo journey. As all courses are, he’ll muse. I am my course. I am what I am. A ray? A line? A plane? All these? None of these? A single line on the page, wandering to and fro, back’n forth, yet always moving from beginning to end. Or vice versa, he’ll guess more or less correctly.
The sun’s equator dipping below the horizon, he feels a whisper of a cool breeze on his neck and feels the goose bumps on his bare arms as he watches his life’s map become desiccate and crumble like ancient oak leaves suddenly heaved skyward by the churning gusts of a stormfront.
He’ll look up and stare, as on that bluing canvas the first stars began to materialize overhead, and watch the renewing winds vaporize and carry off into the void the sum total of his life’s journey; and the chart with it; and he becomes one again with the Om. With the Cosmos.
He wonders silently as the arctic pole of the solar disk sinks reluctantly into a sea which is somewhere off beyond the vantage of his eagle’s nest, yet whose salty smell will ever be there at the ready when called upon.
He wonders how different, really, are we: from the computers which we create…in our own image. And, for that matter, how different: from the gods which created us…in their own image.
The rose fades to pink, the lavender to blue; the night bloomers somewhere down there in the creeping darkness of the oasis spread their velvety wings and soak up the universe of dark matter as it flows by like so many dust motes in a photonegative. Above, the blazing pinpoints (with each their own army of theoretical angels singing praises to their masters) flicker like Christmas lights viewed from the mountain top.
…in their own image, he thinks. And he watches as the answer fractalizes and spirals inward—toward some hopeful vanishing point out just beyond the memory of that bubbling horizon—spinning into the singularity into which all questions must eventually fall into in order to be answered.
posted by Jefferson | 9:55 AM
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