*
This dichotomy between warriorship and lovingkindness. I chase after both. My wife would tell you that I am on the far end of the teeter-totter, all one way, bristling with knives and guns and agression, with only the occasional glance over my shoulder at the other side. Myself, I feel probably the other way, that I am all spiritual creaminess and love and kindness, and I arm myself and fight and train in order to get a little balance the other way. But that’s not accurate, not really. It reflects something true, but in a distorted way. I don’t know what I’m after. Some kind of truth. The truth of inhabiting both worlds, the strength that comes from tempering my body and mind in training for combat, and the strength that comes from loving fully, giving my heart without reservation, being open to everything this world that is going to kill me has to offer.
It’s as good a struggle as any, I suppose.
*
I often daydream about being able to go back in time, way, way back, to the dawn of our species, and to live with our earliest human ancestors in the wildness of a new world. Hunt dangerous game with wooden spears. Gather fruit and berries in some primeval forest. Sit in a circle around a fire, sharing the stories of the day. Live in a time without time. A world where all relationships are personal, where the world is intimate and vast, all at once.
Maybe it would seem impossibly impoverished to me. Maybe I’d die from infection after an insect bite or a minor cut, or from eating something poisonous, or falling out of a tree. Probably I wouldn’t last long at all, and the whole thing would be nasty, brutish, and short.
But wouldn’t there be glorious days of ranging across a vast plain, chasing game with a band of my brothers? Wouldn’t there be a star-mad sky pressing down close on us in the wildness of blackest night? Wouldn’t there be an intimacy with the known world that we’ve lost now? Wouldn’t I be in my place?
Don’t get me wrong. I love my life here and now. It’s an exciting time to be alive, every bit as wild and astounding as the dawn of man, or the age of dinosaurs, or the age of interstellar travel. I am grateful for these small handful of years.
But I am endlessly greedy for more.
*
In a hundred million years, there won’t be a single species on the face of the earth that is alive today. We’ll all have walked off the stage, and been replaced by something new.
Something we can’t even imagine.
*
I love this world and everything in it.
*
Namaste.
***
The Dishwasher's Tears 
Oh it aches my heart good to see your spectacular art springing out and entering me like the wooden spear that it is this those children reading those terrible trees. I have been asked in interviews where do you think poetry is going which is kind of a dumb question but my answer has always been the same that we have to move away from the internet from computers and embrace each other physically. This would be difficult for me but I would do it and you put it bang right here Wouldn’t there be an intimacy with the known world that we’ve lost now? You’re right as always. You are as right as rain. As right as the mud flats on the Oregon coast and I adore you.
Rebecca
Maybe soon real human interaction will be like art, like poetry. You will have to intend for it to happen. You will have to be an artist to make it. Nobody else will really like it or understand it.
Or maybe that’s already happened.
yrs-
Scott
PS- You are too wonderful to me. I like that.
Wonderful post–all of it.
Thank you.
I think it is possible that we possess ancient memories on a cellular level of the world you describe. I feel that our longing is not imagining but knowing, remembering who we were, who we still are, trying our best to replicate it here. You describe it beautifully.
I think it is easy to conceive of bits and pieces of our long DNA strands bearing messages and memories of past experience…these machines in which we are embodied are both new and ancient at the same time, and maybe it is a stretch to think that our minds are aware of that past at all, but not so much to imagine our bodies crying out for a more familiar place and time.
thanks.
There is nothing new under the sun and all is vanity. They used to be my mantras, and now I wonder. I’m always torn between the warrior self (the one that bears what I bear) and the surrender self, the knowing nothing and the knowing all. I thought of the movie “The Known World” when I read this post. I think Terence Malick is at once terribly pretentious and then, again, terribly visionary. Have you seen it?
Yeah, I feel the same way about Malick. Pretentious as shit, but I forgive him for it because I love how he makes me feel when I’m in his world. Like Herzog, only more wonder and awe, less horror, or less affront at the horror. Herzog almost seems surprised at how awful the world is all the time.
So much of the time I feel blind and numb, stumbling through my days. It feels like a crime when every moment the world really is exactly as Malick and Herzog and Matisse and Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor showed us it is.
You know that truth better than most of us. Like how the string theory guys will tell you that all those extra dimensions are wrapped up in the tiny substructure of our three dimensional world, the numinous and the shitty are all tangled up together.
Nor would we really want it any other way.
That’s why this fucked up world is the way it is. So we’ll get the most out of it. What tortures us is inextricable from what astounds us with its beauty.
That doesn’t make the torture any less real. It just makes it really, really stupid to miss out on the other side of the coin, the beauty strewn everywhere before us, free for the taking.
love-
Scott
I keep coming back to stare at the ghost trees. The trees that seem tethered to the water, the trees that seem solid and real, but aren’t.
I keep staring at that girl’s black socks. Or, maybe that’s just black muck creeping up her legs.
I briefly wondered what all the ghost children were reading so intently, so completely, with such abandon that they seem to have abandoned the world around them.
I then wondered if the world around the children had abandoned them.
And then, last night, after briefly, keenly, mourning for everyone and everything I have ever lost, I wondered, after staring at these ghost children and ghost trees, why things are the way they are.
And why things aren’t.
As always, brother, your art feeds me.