The Speed of Light

As a blog presents an opportunity to capture one's daily thoughts conversationally, I was thinking about light the other day. The sun was shining. I was walking the dog, my brother's dog, a chocolate lab bitch, while he's been away on honeymoon. I sat at a picnic table to write a bit, the dog nudging the tennis ball toward me now and again, throwing it, wiping my hand off on my Levi's, writing some, getting the ball suggested back to me from doggie's mouth.

Physicists like Einstein came up with a good model for light. Farraday's experiments led to a concept of an electromagnetic field that existed alongside the current traveling through a wire. The light we see, with its particular speed, is the mother of all electromagnetic energy. Sitting in a park, one feels the light energy that emanates from the sun. Traveling in a field, the light touches upon us, upon leaf, upon picnic table, gently, connecting us through this band of visible radiation to the celestial powers of the Sun.

So what is the light energy that accounts for our presence? What sort of field is our life a part of? What is the source of the particular shining that is our own landing in one particular part of the world? What is the speed of this energy's source, what physical laws apply to it? What is the basic fact of our condition that accounts for our energy?

I could only come up with the Beatitudes, if we had to find something describing what we have in common, what we are. We are meek, mournful, sick, poor, lonely, homesick, confused, and though we might disguise the condition, we can never really change from it. And you're going to learn more and be more and improve yourself acknowledging and living with the fact of this sort of suffering.

To my mind, moments of literature leave us little experimental moments that capture the nature of the shine of human light. Walking in the woods, and feeling the same energy I had with the sun on my back in the park, I thought of Big Two-Hearted River, Hemingway's Nick out on his own in nature, gently touching it, making his space in it. I thought of how it made sense to picture Saint Jerome outdoors. I thought of The Catcher in the Rye's image of a saint coming through the rye, 'when a body catches a body...' I thought of Levin mowing grain with his serfs. I thought of Kerouac feeling like an idiot for having to stay at his sister's house in North Carolina, that summer when he was the gentle "Saint Jean of the Dogs." (Rightly so, we have a picture of Kerouac in our heads of the outdoors, the open road, the mountain, the cabin, the found flannel shirt as token of a bare-bones life. Behind the seeming Beatnik frivolity and excess, a bit of the tickings of a saint, albeit in human form.) I thought of Sherwood Anderson's old writer with his aches and his old carpenter friend at the very beginning of Winesburg, Ohio, somewhere deep inside of him a Joan of Arc. I thought of Hamlet, who is being quite honest when he says, 'man delights not me.' Or something like that.

The writer offers, at the least, a refreshing change from the stale, oppressive and overdone versions of happiness littered upon a city and a mass culture through illusions of what The Self might need, behind which lurks an 'us against them' mentality. In starting out with a simple instinct to write, it becomes mainly about what you learn through writing, less about the craft of, say, a well-captured dialog between two characters. Any great mind, it seems, hurts, bears the sorrows that come from a principal identification with other human beings, and this in turn is what one would offer. Don't get me wrong, people can be happy too, and that's great, the whole point, just how to get there, or where to start trying, none of us being any particular expert regarding such a fickle thing.

(Sex, or simple bodily communion, presents the opportunity for the best expression of our beatitude. There we are, lonely, aching, aging, never able to really be certain we are communicating fully, fairly, directly, without lies given or received, and sex cures us of all our aches, momentarily, but lastingly. Maybe it's somewhere in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men we get that sense of the sad, the beatific to love-making.)

I have only dragged these thoughts back from the forest rendered poorly as I sit at my desk, back in society as it were, jotting some of it out.

A writer can't really relax until he realizes that life's not about joy and pleasure, that rather it is a very serious thing, and that the job of writing too is very serious. There is a responsibility to be a kind of poetic scientist.

Jesus came at the Beatitudes through his years with publicans and sinners, as it sounds like he spent time with them in tavern sort of places. It's like he was there through years of barroom laughs, of sinful pleasures and sorrows shared with mates, all the many people he'd seen going through life's up and downs, loudness and quiet. Finally, he figured it out, got what 'it was all about.' And he no longer tried so willfully to be happy, and then he found the happiness of the body of light within him, and an impossible wisdom, and gentleness radiated from him. Remember, like Buddha, Christ was--at least he could have been--a normal ordinary guy like you and I, who achieved enlightenment.

No one thing is, upon consideration, cause for either sadness or happiness, sorrow or joy, but rather a yin and yang mixture, and by being so, ultimately on the positive side of the sheet, as a thing to be treasured for it being in our lives, something to learn a life lesson by, therefore cherished.