The war, the war...  It had all become a war.  War on the television.  War in everyone's minds, war broken out in every part, every aspect of public life.  Economic war, war of words and opinion, war against the psyche...  War spilling out everywhere.  Winners made at the cost of making losers, real losers.


He remembered, in dream, his kind father.  He remembered the Chevrolet station wagon, red with simulated wooden panel.  A Malibu.  He remembered the space-ship like campus, of cubical concrete units with large picture windows and brightly colored blinds, yellow and orange, the campus where his father taught, laid out on the land just so.  His father, the perfect kind gentleman, who'd call him when he was running late, or lost.  In the dream he knew his father's kindness toward him, and wanted to be kind back, to acknowledge it all, the gentle peacefulness.  In the dream he had gone to get groceries to bring them back, and then they would all have dinner together.

All the things that had happened since then, the war...  The war of people your own age dismissing you, dismissing your father, as if to say, "I do not know the man."  People not wanting to believe in you, not giving you the benefit of the doubt, but rather crucifying you with their little opinions, each like a nail, each like a small blow, binding you to something you did not want.  There was too much passive about you, not enough standing up for yourself, in retrospect, not known at the time.

So you fell, you lowered yourself, you humbled yourself...  Down to the point where at least people seemed to appreciate you...  What could they not like about you, waiting on them hand and foot, smiling, listening, laughing at the joking.

But that too, like everything else in the great misreading, the lack of comprehension, the lack of seeing that it truly was a war, in which there were awful consequences coming your way, was a big mistake.

And all along, you kept within the knowledge of Tralfamador and its perfect justice.  You remembered hyper-space, that bird's nest from which we all are sprung from...


Hemingway was correct...  Only in the mornings would you be able to be back in contact with such things, before all the noise of lives led...  Only then could you tell what was shit writing and what was not.  Only then would you, could you, have faith again in those glimmering tiny thin spider strands that lifted you up, connections to the whole of the reality of the created Multiverse.

The connection was not easy to maintain.  It was hard.  It was hard enough to cut out some private space of peace to believe in it, all those marvelous things that mystics understood, inklings of which had informed the better angels of earthly governing systems.  It was hard to find a little old book, What Is Buddhism, from the London, The Buddhist Society, first published 1928, and believe a word of it.

It was hard to recognize how one himself had been rejected, just like Jesus, just like Jesus who was a teacher, just like Jesus taught.  They wouldn't get you.  They would hurl their own misunderstandings, their own clever figuring-out-the-war at you.  To figure out how to save themselves, they had to be able to turn you in, to shun you, you weren't good enough.

But, you had your private moments, your moments of faithful peace.  Hemingway, and other men who had seen war, and women too, took these little breathing spaces with the meaning to them that they were the occasion to write.  Whatever writing was.  They did it.  Mystics.  You had to be crazy, you had to be a fool...  A sick sense of humor...


People went about their business, participating, they could claim unknowingly, in the war.



The soccer stadium...  That had all been tainted.  Ever since the Romans had dragged the Celts through the streets, ever since warriors had been put to fight to the death in the Colosseum, ever since putting Christians to be torn apart by beasts in a ring...  Ever since the public gathering spaces had been co-opted by men like Hitler, great Olympic stadiums...   The horror of the Nuremburg Rallies.

But the Tour, men on bikes going through the countryside, this was more like a healthy challenge, an escape...  The countryside, farm houses, small individual towns, vineyards, fields, forests, hills and mountains and streams were the backdrop...


You had to be a gentleman, an improbable person, a so-called intellectual (detached, absent mined, impractical), to get it, to know where, on a hunch, to look.  Egghead.  Ichabod Crane.  The great otherworldly intellectual being whose true mind was so far elsewhere, so completely beyond the horizons of normal matters...

Your father had to walk in you, live within you, again.  You had to remember him, to not forget him, to channel him and his gentle way and his voice...

You had to be the collector, the curator, of all the improbable and impractical ideals and all the spiritual musings and wanderings and beliefs that come to the human imagination, sometimes as they had through whatever means, in whatever guttural expressions...  You had to keep all this stuff with you, and for that, you had to be reasonably private, not to appear too outlandish...


The man made himself a cup of coffee in the small Bialetti, as his mother did.  He remembered the coffee in the morning with her from the visit, before they'd go for a walk where the great overhead electrical wires met the expanses of nature, wetland, birds...   The coffee was a way, a means, to be in contact with Tralfamador and Hyperspace, and all higher minds like that of Jesus and the Buddha and Noah, and Moses, and Abraham, and David who could travel with its vastness and wisdoms...  To rise above the war state on the Planet Earth and the mistreatment of its creation, the wild animals, the flora and fauna, all all the supposedly inanimate parts of it so horribly misunderstood, minds not taken into account...  The rape of ocean and bedrock, of water, of forest and plain...  Of all of God's carefully wrought creatures made just so...