Reminiscence

For my Ithaca friends. A detective story fragment.

He leaves by the side entrance turning north toward the center of town. The forsythia blooms, and he thinks of the warm rains that have soothed him this Spring. Turning east on Clinton, he heads for the small benches lined against the railing overlooking the swollen creek, and sits one facing the shadowed facade of the police station.

There is very little he can do at the moment besides think somewhat obsessively about one or two things his client had said to him, as when she intoned puzzlement that the kind man she saw had perhaps not moved his mouth while speaking. 'Live' things appearing and disappearing at her door.

The afternoon sun, its beams falling through the slatted transit station across the walkway, gradually calm him. He notices the bee bedazzled hyacinths and wonders if they're enhanced. He considers the silver drop he'd seen at her forehead--no doubt hallucinated--and how it had captivated him even before he'd noticed her.

It would not be the first time a certain kind of feeling had led him to a dead end. And yet her way of telling the story--believing herself honest and truthful while subverting the storyline to some hidden purpose--is precisely what triggered his wanting to help her.

He falls asleep without the least bit of fuss, propped against the railing bars. A dream comes to him, one that he would likely remember only as a sense of inner softening: his father standing in a doorway, inviting him in; back-lit by the last golden rays of the day.

He wakes in the cooler air after sunset, thinking about holos he'd seen of the antique Bessemer furnaces pouring pure molten steel into twelve ton iron buckets. About his brother's sense of industry; his nieces, whom he loves but rarely sees. He thinks of oak trees bearing acorns, some at high frigid elevations, some in hot drylands. Giving pleasure and shelter and  sustenance and support. And the deep desire in human beings for making: making the world toward a perfect replica of paradise.

Only to realize that his mind had circled him back to the client. Were he to clarify his thinking now, the pleasant daze he felt might disappear. His right hand lies flat on the bench seat beside him, so he uses it to push himself up.

BODY

He carries a silence within him, and is moved to offer it to a higher power, which he can not grasp and can not name, perceiving it only as Absence, vast beyond imagining.

He recognizes the patterning of his mind: incessant thought, feeling, image, so much of it trivial and repetitive. But too, there is a more deeply felt sense of his body, a solid, silent realm of living possibilities, empty and waiting. And welling up from this, in a cycle of appearance independent of time's passage, hints, images, directives; a flow of intelligence entering his awareness from a dimension folded into the everyday, akin to dreams.

He wonders what he would experience if that intelligence would flow without the resistance of the habitual mind, and drops quietly into contemplation.

His focus on this internal body space, he tracks in his loins a downward flowing opening into dynamic emptiness, as if one would synchronize with that and be taken anywhere, do anything, like the sounding of a deep bass drum pulsing, expanding beyond measure.

He perceives shimmering in an empty space in the region of his throat and jaws, its core in the notch above his breast bone, expanding and pulsing with that same dynamism, a sense of outward movement permeating space with its essential vibration.

In his belly, the booming of the drum comes from above. He feels invited to open a door, and enters a heaving cataclysm, ten thousand voices in the language of dreams, a repository of all that he has ever known or could know, a sense of belonging to all that is or ever could be.

An expanding light field opens in his mind, the light taking all experience into itself, into its infinite possibilities, reclaiming and recycling and renewing and recombining it, infusing it with its own star-like essence; all of this in silence; all with a feeling of surrender into love, acceptance of everything, profound empathy in the heart.

When he had mused like this for perhaps half an hour, the sound of a thrasher calling from his yard intervened. He marvels at this down-to-earth intrusion, and at the other-worldly dream time imagery that seems to have included it.
He thinks of the bird, and of the millions of years during which his kind has heard them, delighting in them, coveting them, waking to their pre-dawn chatter, all represented to him in this moment as an intimate messenger from his own being.

Curve billed thrasher, Toxostoma curvirostre