DRIVING IN NEUTRAL

In our crowded fearful world we cackle incoherently, cacophany
like battery chickens in our tiny cages. Here, now, there is only space
to talk. Action is impossible, and in any case forbidden,
and renders all our conversations moot.

The time for talk and stories is long past — we will be judged
not by our narratives, our recollections, our impassioned speeches,
our skill at presentation, or debate, or rhetoric, or manipulation of truth,
but by what we do. And as long as we just chatter on, tell tales,
transmit information, read facts and opinions, acquire knowledge, write,
analyze, shout, whisper, scream, communicate in a thousand inchoate ways,
we accomplish nothing.

We pass our deadened, lonely, fearful lives in dazed perpetual unreadiness,
reacting to the ceaseless flood of data which monopolizes our attention,
as it saps the energy we need for action.
And each distracted learning yields new ignorance
and leaves us paralyzed.
Conception numbs perception, leaves our minds
congested with such rich and blinding wisdom that
there’s nothing left to see the truths that only come when we imagine.

See there, a man with a strange compulsive disorder:
He packs for an incipient and momentous journey, but then stops
and unpacks everything, moving each item to a different stack,
and then repacks it, purposefully, only to stop and repeat the cycle
of perpetual preparation, going nowhere.

(My Summer Fiction copy of New Yorker has arrived,
so full of stories: Another personal horror tale from Boyle,
a trilogy of interwoven stories from Munro, of anguish and humiliation, starkly told,
as is the style today of good Canadian writers.
But these are narratives of helplessness, their heroes mostly victims
living and reacting in the passive tense.
I search in vain for clarion calls, primal truths, direction how to put things right,
the purpose of our lives, perhaps, or even insight into why cats purr.

There is no instruction here on what to do, now or ever.

The magazine has a do-it-yourself bumper sticker, I   _______,
and at first I scribbled WRITING in the empty space,
but then to my dismay I saw my ‘R’ looked like a Freudian ‘A’
and that my mobile message would just advertise my own complicity
in using words as sad apologies for doing nothing, really, yet —
which would be all the more ironic on a car they call an ‘Odyssey’.)

Life’s meaning won’t be found in human words, so often full of rage,
apology and grim regret. It’s found instead in silence — speechless, breathless,
in the summer rain, the rustle of leaves in the wind, a child playing with a dog,
a hawk soaring in the sun, a moonlit walk at midnight, when time stops —
when the Earth connects you to her soul, and whispers:
“Love without bounds, open your senses and your heart
and experience the wonder-full and ever-deepening joy
that comes from being one with us — you’re home
and there is nothing here to fear.”

And cats purr, of course, because they understand all this, instinctively,
and, so, because they can.

Photo of Davezilla’s cat Jade by Rannie at Photojunkie.ca.