where deer stroll peacefully past computers

Some mornings I wake up porous, as if the world is moving through  my body and consciousness.

Meditation and reading poetry do that to me as well. The first time I read Richard Brautigan’s 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America, amazed at the sentences coming out in different shapes, I put down the paperback on the passage telephone stand, walked into the kitchen and the light  fell through me,  words kept tumbling around in my head and making new shapes.  Brautigan was like finding David Foster Wallace back then, the same vulnerability: a gentle blond hippy with granny glasses and scoliosis, a little stoned and funny, melancholic  at times.

The next morning I got up early and ate my breakfast. I took a slice of white bread to use for bait. I planned on making doughballs from the soft center of the bread and putting them on my vaudevilliean hook. I left the place and walked down to the different street corner. How beautiful the field looked and the creek that came pouring down in a waterfall off the hill.

But as I got closer to the creek I could see that something was wrong. The creek did not act right. There was a strangeness to it. There was a thing about its motion that was wrong. Finally I got close enough to see what the trouble was. The waterfall was just a flight of white wooden stairs leading up to a house in the trees. I stood there for a long time, looking up and looking down, following the stairs with my eyes, having trouble believing. Then I knocked on my creek and heard the sound of wood. I ended up by being my own trout and eating the slice of bread myself.

By the time I found Brautigan’s work, he himself had been dead for many years, a depressed and suicidal alcoholic who finally shot himself in 1982. For years I thought of him as a has-been, a part of the indulgent silliness of the Sixties. Then I found his work again and the poetry  flashed through me like quicksilver. The work outlasts the writer.

My computer is humming away happily and  the rewriting is done. The washing machine is churning away in the kitchen, the dogs are outside in the garden. Coffee is percolating in the battered percolator, Ethiopian coffee so strong I can’t manage more than half a cup. Machines of loving grace. In the distance a siren summons workers back into the packing sheds of the local co-op. Tractors rumbling around the perimeters of the vineyards, silence falling through me  so that I can sit down and get back to the writing, one sentence after another, phrases clicking together like bits of Lego, wild surmises paying off. Somewhere buried in the text onscreen, somewhere hidden deep in the forest of words, there is a unicorn waiting to be found.

Richard Brautigan again:

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammels and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

 

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