the Scientific Method

When he was younger, he had things all figured out. Or so he had thought. While all the evidence at that time had seemed to support him, he had to admit, now, that most of what he knew, or could prove, pointed in another, less interesting direction.

The unravelling had been a long and dreadful process, almost a cliche. First the money, then the friends, then the friends of money, followed by the money of friends. Ultimately--and this was quite a surprise at the time--it turned out that nothing worth understanding was understandable, and, worse, nobody worth loving was lovable. He had his grip on the most pernicious of modern conundrums, but what good did it do him? Sure, there was poetry. But he had spent the night before watching the fat man--now considerably thinned--read his work to an asphyxiating room full of people who had to--now he thought of it--be described as the sworn enemies of poetry. As though the sausage factory had substituted worms and decay for good wholesome meat.

It had taken quite a while to begin the process of understanding. He had naively assured himself, long, long, ago, that he was on his way to enlightenment. Had not the Buddha struggled at first with the sheer drama of attachment? Surely. So he had learned to divest himself of those things that carried the weight he preferred not to be anchored by. Of course, freedom itself was problematic. The falcon slipped through the gap between trees, cool wind punctuating its flight, announcing that moment of migration between arrival and departure, when the claws and hooks are meant for what is close at hand.

He learned to accept and appreciate those things that could happily be had without first messing with labor, or trucking goods about. That, certainly, was the road to tedium--hardly his destination of choice. He stood out on the road, about a mile from the center of town. He wanted a ride, but more importantly wanted the ride to be provided by a sultry hybrid of an innocent barrista with eyes like cowrie shells and an ass like a glass of soy milk poured into a miniature hot water bottle, and a cruel librarian. That--that alone--would be worth his trouble. He was done compromising. The sky was a red mist: war threatened. But after all he was on the safe side. Nothing could actually hurt him. There were only obstacles. The fat man had sung, yes, and it was bad. But was the value of his song to be measured in its outward, or rather, in its inward, effects?

He had known it all when he was quite young. The stars had once been legible, out of the horizon above the sea. Now they were a smear. There had been singing; now there were only voices.