My Bowl

Lightning flashes.  At least, I believe it's lightning.  The thought is ruled out, really.  I have never heard thunder accompanying these flashes.  Charges build up and arc or spark, I suppose.  All I know is, it is light, it flashes brightly and it's gone again in an instant.  In the moment of the flash, I can see.  There are images that decorate the walls.  They seem to merge with the wall like a mural.  I imagine the artist smeared fat from the very animals depicted onto the wall, and color was mixed into the grease.  The images are sanguine, made of ochre, umber, lime and charcoal.

I really know next to nothing.  I know the colors from what I've seen in the momentary flashes of light.  I'm telling myself a story about the images.  The idea about the fat and the pigments comes from what I've heard about other cave paintings.  It's not a wall, exactly.  It's a surface created by some kind of ancient incident that gouged out the solid rock.  This is another story I'm telling myself.  I don't know how it was formed.  It is roughly vertical in places.  It's more like a very large pipeline.  It's uneven. 

The images are quite elegant, to me.  They depict the animals with reasoned and admirable grace.  The people are charcoal stick figures.  It seems to me that whoever felt the impulse to compose and create these pictures had far more respect for the animals than she had for the people.  It's anyone's guess why they have erections while taking part in a scene that mimics an accident in a blacksmith's shop.  At this time, I will not hazard such a guess - enough stories.

There's another flash.  There are thousands, perhaps millions of possible stories I could tell myself regarding these shadows that flicker across my mentality.  Plato was right!  Well, maybe not.  These images mean nothing, really.  My mentality and my personality mean nothing.  I can't touch these shadows, fleeting sensations.  I tell myself over and over again not to indulge in elaborations on what I see when the light flashes, but I really don't understand why I shouldn't.  I remember from long ago, I was told I shouldn't tell myself that I shouldn't.  No.  I was told it would be better if I didn't say I shouldn't.  I'm told it would be better if I were to say to myself "it would be better if - whatever."  Fill in the blank.  This is absolute nonsense when I haven't eaten in days.  Who knows how long?  I am pretty sure I'm alone.

The walls are interlaced with lodestone.  There is iron galore!  It's running in veins through the stone.  There's hematite, iron ore, rusted iron, black pig iron and slag by the ton littering the floors.  It's broken free from the stone.  It's strewn on the floor and stuffed into narrow passageways.  By whom?  That is an invitation to tell myself more stories.  I shouldn't.  It's only an invitation from myself to myself.  I don't see any reason to accept it.  Why extend it?  I can't even entertain myself with the stories, anymore. 

It would be better if... something else.  I don't know what else, but nothing else has been adequate, so far.  I entertain ideas of else!  Something else, elsewhere.  I'm hosting fantasies.

God!  It smells like a junkyard after a thunderstorm in here, the wet stone, the wet iron and who knows what else.  I'm chilled to my bones.  Some clothes would be nice. 
There's flint littering the floor, too.  Why call it a floor?  It's not a floor.  It's the surface I walk on when I can take a few steps in a random direction.  There's one more flash.  Sometimes, I barely know my right from my left.  I pretend I'm writing with a pencil to know it, just like I did when I was a child.  East?  West?  If I had an internal compass, all this stone full of iron surrounding me would wash it out.  How long have I been in here?  There's no day or night. 

I awake. 

My head!  My neck!  Evidently, I've been bashed in the head.  There was a horrible jolt.  There was the briefest moment of shock and pain, and I saw sparks fly in all directions.  Then, I was in utter darkness again.  That does it!  I vow to stop walking without the light.  It's a sin.  I'm being punished for it.  By whom?  Now there's another stupid question.  Am I horizontal?  No more speech.  What?

My tongue is a sandwich.  My body and my brain are soup.  I still have my bowl.  It holds the soup.  Without it, I'd be lost!  Please!  Set my bowl afloat on the river.  It's so important to me.  I can see it, now.  Half-full of vegetables, noodles and broth, it rides low in the water.  It floats on the waves for some time until it becomes awash with the murky, green water.  It sinks. 

It's me there I see.  It is I, there in the bowl.  The fish will eat some of the vegetables and the noodles.  The broth will dissolve into the rest of the river water, which is also soup.  The water will evaporate and be purified.  I'll fall again in the rain.  I'll fall into the bushes and trees.  The bamboo and the grasses will drink me up.  The soil will become more soup from which I'll grow in the plants.  People will make soup with the plants and the bamboo shoots.  People will make more soup from me. 

I will tell you a secret.  The bushes, trees and grasses, in the winter, they whisper.  "Make paper from my inner bark.  Make cloth from my fibers, ink and charcoal from my burned, wooden, bare winter bones.  Take the summer leaves and make dye, indigo.  Make me blank paper, off white.  Make a brush from hair and one of my limbs.  Stain me with my own image in skillful, dancing movements.  Then, burn me again."  

I tell you.  I beg you.  Don't paint in these caves.  Stay in the forest, the savanna.  Stay in the open lands.  Never leave the sunlight.  Forsake metal forever, iron, bronze, even gold - especially gold.  Love the land.  Love the sky, the water.  Love this earth. 

I sleep.

God!  I'm awake again!  I'm outside, bathing in the even, grey light of a pale, overcast day.  Brilliant!  I'm outside!  In the summer, in the bright, clear days of summer, the winds push and pull, curl and fashion the clouds as if a brush were leaving graceful traces.  In the path of its wielder's hand, the dance of her arm and her body is her personality.  Every stroke is grace.  But on this winter day, the air is so heavy with water that the wind leaves no trace of its movements in the clouds.  Yet it is as sweet to me as a vernal equinox.

Every day she leaves her signature on the sky, on the land and in the water.  On days like this all her movement is a wash.  The sun is a candle shining behind rice paper.  That shining, translucent grey, how beautiful it is.  It's the color of winter, and it is like a symphony, to me.  It's there as if for the first time, for me.  In my conscious mind, where it didn't exist for me before, now it is the marrow within my bones of experience.  It fills my throat, my lungs with the air of home.  The experience is not confined within me.  My being reaches out to it.  I am touching this sky. 

When I was a child, I would color with the smelly crayons, and I would choose one of the blue ones to color in the sky.  I would begin at the top of the page and make my way down, back and forth.  How far down do I go?  The ground is already colored in, a patch of green reaches a third of the way up from the bottom of the page.  Does the sky go all the way down to the ground?  No.  I'll stop coloring the sky about here.  There! 

One third of the page would be green, the top third was blue, and there was blank manilla paper in the middle, etched with circles and lines that parodied the few people and one animal I knew of, a nuclear family isolated from everything.  The world was stratified, from bottom to top - earth and grass - several people accompanying one small house pet - sky.  A three-tiered world like a tricolor flag, and people are in the middle.  Heaven and earth don't meet.  Our world stands in between, in limbo.

Now, I know.  This sky loves the ground, enfolding the land and water.  She could never stand to be separate.  The sky is the air on my face, on my arms and in my chest.  It reaches into my lungs.  It travels in my blood, carried on rusted iron.  It is my first introduction to infinity, and it's the ground my dreams are built on.  This sky is beyond the air.  It is the sun, the moon and the stars high above.  It is the space that our earth, our sea and sky move within, one infinite sky.  It is inhabited by beings that I cannot even imagine.  It's full of the dust of stars that are creating new stars and planets, complete with other skies.  These are our stars, this our sky!  I hope I'm not dreaming.