Thursday, August 30, 2007

Red moon, white moon

What I found interesting is that the red moon looked like a ball, but the white new moon looks like a disc.

Zenella is more interested in reading about space than she is in experiencing it. I suppose that an eclipse just happens too slowly for a child, and I could not communicate why it struck me. Mrs Zen was not interested at all. She prefers ground level.

I cannot say she is wrong to feel that, because I often think that life would be better if I didn't lose my head in thinking about space and our place in it, in dreams that are insubstantial and pointless.

You know, the moon circles the earth at 2300 miles an hour and both circle the sun at about 60 thousand miles an hour.

I can walk at 4 miles an hour. It would take me more than 58 thousand hours to walk to the moon, were it possible. Nearly seven years.

***

Sometimes I regret having had children. I can't help thinking of the pain they will suffer in this life. Yes, I know there are compensations. But also life will end, and I have condemned them to that.

"Regret" is not the right word, but I don't know a better one. "Regret" implies that I do not want them, and that is never true. In that sense, I never regret them for an instant, and I am sure that I never will.

***

I still believe in magic. You'd think you'd grow out of it, but I never have.

I dream that I will wake up tomorrow and be really good at poker, so good that I become free. It's just a lottery dream, a reach for the moon dream.

It's not real.

But real is a drag sometimes, don't you find? Even deeply cynical realists have to dream; there has to be a moon to reach for.

And when you have it, sitting in the palm of your hand, and the blazing disc that you thought you would have is nothing but a rubbery red ball.

But imagine. Just imagine. That when you reach out to grab a rubbery red ball, you have been fooled by an optical illusion, and what you have is a blazing sun, wonderful to hold.

***

Maybe they will live forever. Maybe we all will. Maybe I have been wrong about everything, except for love. I will never believe I am wrong about that, because without it, we are no more than apes tortured with the ability to think about our own demise, and how bad would that feel?

3 Comments:

At 6:46 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

boots sez:

Materialism has its appeals, you feel safe because you think you can do things, make things happen, you feel secure because you think you know the limits of reality, it has a lot of seductive qualities.

Then you look at a child you love and say "What have I done!" because the child has been condemned to the world you inhabit. You consider magic and think it a dream, you know what is real and it is strange and ugly.

One day perhaps you will become weary of the material world and wish not to be alive, become willing to die just to be out of the prison, and perchance you may begin to look behind the curtain that has been pulled over the miraculous by words like "random" and "chance" which attempt but fail to hide reality.

Not the likely, but the possible; who can say what will happen to Zen tomorrow or if tomorrow will come. If I tell you how good it can be your fears that I am telling the truth will demand of me a pill, a prescription, that proves you wrong so that you can be proved right.

You're fucked, accept it.

 
At 12:28 am, Anonymous Father Luke said...

Sometimes, when I'm bored, I ponder
the differences between resignation,
and acceptance.

Without being too much of a fuck
head, there's magic in acceptance,
and resignation is flat.

For fun, notice the differences of
those two experiences.

- -
Okay,
Father Luke

 
At 3:16 pm, Anonymous theminotaur said...

"I still believe in magic. You'd think you'd grow out of it, but I never have."

And you wonder why "Harry Potter" is so popular... No matter how badly it's written, this whole idea of the boy who one day wakes up and discovers that he IS special, that there IS a different world, and there ARE people who love him, resonated with so many people that it is obvious: we all want to believe in magic.

:)

I know that the magic you mean is perhaps of a different kind.

How many sperm is there in an average ejaculation? That's at least how many (-1) chances you had of not existing. Is your existence, against all odds, magic? Or is it just a coincidence? And is gravity, this force that draws everything together, the same as love?

 

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