kurt schwitters, 3
In all my time in the mountains, I have had the same bed, a wooden frame with a 3/4 inch plywood surface and an old, like something Social Services would arrest me for sleeping on, cotton mattress, all fluffed up after a day in the sun, it's about 4 inches thick. After being slept on every night and countless days it's about an inch thick, if that, where the imprint of my mortal frame has custom-fitted it for me, personally. Like the way a shoe feels better the longer it's worn. That imprint is my hammock and with the blanket makes my cocoon from which I rise refreshed and ready to face whatever is next. I don't have wings, but my spirit has me upright, the spirit being what the wings symbolize, unless angels really do look like white doves flying.
I knew an old Regular Baptist elder who died of old age 20 years ago; he told me of a time an angel came to him in the living room and he recognized it for a winged angel. Another man told me of a time an angel came to him. These were old mountain people, the origin of American pragmatism. You're not going to fool one of them with an hallucination or a dream. Maybe you could fool one, but it wouldn't be Millard Pruitt getting fooled. Millard's credibility was a hundred percent with me when he told me he saw an angel. Accuse him of lying about it and he'd be up out of his chair before you could say scat. Though that wasn't the reason I believed him. I believed him because I knew him.
Back to the wooden bed. It has no springs, no cushioning. I prefer to sleep on the board itself, which I have done, but the mattress is the same thing as on the board, having no cushion value. The mattress is a mold for my frame that holds me in place comfortably like an old shoe. Some years ago reading a book about Shirdi Sai Baba, I saw that he slept on a plank of wood. It took years, a lot of years before I felt I was ready. From that moment on, it subconsciously became my goal to be able to sleep on a board. Chiropractors recommend a hard bed. I found I like it even better than on a mattress. My mortal frame feels best when I sleep on my bed that is the same as a board, as the mattress I lie on is about as thick as a thin blanket. I like it. It is the only bed I can be comfortable in. I've never liked a big mattress bed. They're more like wrestling rings without ropes than a place for repose. All the sheets and fitted sheets, box springs and all that goes with it, I'd rather use an open sleeping bag for a blanket. Wear bed clothes and it doesn't get dirty so fast. I'm not looking for a spread in Southern Living. The only way SL would look at my home would be an example of a Feng Shui disaster.
This is taking the long way around of getting to being able to feel grindings of tectonic plates way down deep. Most often, and consistently until the last few years, I felt the same kind of grindings. It was so subtle vibrating I'd question if the vibrating might be coming from inside me. I wondered what it was for a very long time, until I felt a fairly strong vibration, by comparison, from an earthquake maybe 300 miles away. Of course, I thought, a shock wave travels through rock way down deep underground perhaps at least as fast as sound travels through air. Maybe it's simultaneous. That one was notably a hair stronger than was the norm. Enough to make me notice it. It's amusing to be lying in bed and suddenly it feels like the Fifties motel room bed that vibrated a few minutes for a quarter, long enough to make you wish it would stop long before it does. It's like when the tree frogs are trilling and I can't tell if it's in my head or outside. That's the feeling. Am I trembling or is it the ground? By now I'm used to it. It was never enough to wake me, only felt it while awake.
Over the last year I've felt odd scrapings like I'd never felt before. They started getting my attention again after noticing the grumblings were becoming unsubtle enough to wake me from a light sleep. Then one came in rapid succession, like a slow Uzi, but more like slamming a fist from one hand into the heel of the hand of the other at a fairly rapid pace, though not all out rapid. It woke me and did that quck-punch grinding long enough that I grew tired of focusing on it and went back to sleep. Another time was a long, powerful grinding that felt so unnatural it flashed: fracking. Oh no. Halliburton, naturally. Dick Cheney, naturally. Enemies of the American people. It is seriously poisoning the water all over the country, doing it fast and doing it bad. By bad, I don't even mean where ethics is concerned, only the nature of their product: seriously poison water on a very large scale, like all the underground water, the source of our water. Soon we'll be like Bermuda, an island without fresh water. They keep the roofs painted white with lime and catch the water in barrels when it rains. If fracking goes on much further, at all further, our nation will be devoid of the next resource to go to war over, water. All the more reason for perpetual war for perpetual peace.
Allowing Halliburton and the others the right to destroy our ground water all over the country is beyond absurd. Yet, the gas corporation lobby insures full scholarships to the right schools for Congressional kids, the privilege of membership in the right country clubs, a nice car with a driver, expensive lunches and dinners for free, for corruption, for rising in society, for being sucked up to as a big dog. I look at the kinds of people who become politicians and they make phys ed majors look brilliant. We trust our very existence to them. How ignorant is that? They call the Indians that lived on the continent savages. They at least honored wisdom and after how many thousand years left the continent as pristine as before the first human set foot on it. They flowed with Grandmother Earth. In canoes they could see the bottom of the river and the fish, which were plentiful all those millenia of ignernt spear chuckers running about half naked and beating on a hollow log with sticks.
Don't laugh yet. We got nothing on them. I repeat. We got nothing on them. You and I are not the ones destroying our planet. We get the blame. We are doing our part for the destruction by allowing the corporate world to have its way. Now is too late to take control away from them, even if we made a commendable effort. But what can we do? The system does not include us. United States of America is out of business when the government does not protect the American people from predatory corporate targeting. Why would it? Our government has been usurped in the Shakespearean way, democracy outlawed while We the People watched it happen on tv every evening and never noticed. One thing we do know. The oil corporations are going to do what they want to do and we're not even the bother of a swarm of gnats to them. Not even the bother of a cell phone dead zone.
*
No comments:
Post a Comment