Last night, near 2:00, as I walked home through the Panhandle, I became aware of a certain fullness that I can't quite name. The wind picked up, gently, and around me there was the loud sound of whispering leaves fluttering in the trees; fallen ones slid by, papery and skittering, like empty candy wrappers, and scampered off in the grass; into those secret shadowy places where my eyes couldn't go. The glow of the street lights in the park joined the passing clouds to follow the rustling sound, and it felt as though I had become the S of some faintly whispered word. Then, everything seemed to cease stirring, as if the soothing hand of silence had suddenly stopped all the world's shaking and spinning, and there was only a serene sense of clarity; a stilling mesmerism. I stood in the quiet beneath the sky and felt myself at the same time a discrete micron, some infinitely small particulate piece of a puzzle, a little cosmic atom, but part of an immense, swelling, interconnected, incomprehensibly vast whole.
Wow, I thought to myself, we're all vastholes; the cosmic breeze passes through us, out of us. This is why farts are funny and trombones are sad. This is how jazz birthed cool, or cool birthed jazz. Forget about jazz, the universe, the Big Bang, that 13.798-billion-year-old explosion had clearly occurred when the unmoved mover held a lighter to his black hole and let one rip; a truly noble gas. It all makes sense now.
Suddenly I smelled eggs, perhaps sulphur, and it twisted my lip with quick repellence. Out from behind a tree I saw a half-clothed man, squat and bent over, defecating, his flatus perfuming the night air with the sweet smell of creation.
I smiled, breathed in, and watched a universe being born.
No comments:
Post a Comment