Chaos and Order (in the Rot of the Whale)
...searched the chaotic
waters and found them wanting… from inside came the order,
the Jonah’s call I was
looking for, it said, "but from
within, all answers come,
but from within…"
Sort it out they say, after Chaos and Order has
swallowed me whole~
Like
that’s a possibility ~ down in here,
Like these
things can be sorted out ~
Do you remember that poor Cuban boy being
dragged from his bed on national TV
In the middle o’ night. I remember,
I
also remember a great gray whale washed up on the shore
dead as whales come around here.
At first, it didn’t
make any sense and yet there was a morphic awareness in me About the inherent order
of these things, an unfurnished awareness: this abdominal state o’
mind, I
stare at the ribs of the thing and find everything is relative, but far beyond my
comprehension.
Sort it out they say,
like it’s a possibility in Politics and nature, in the sociobiology of
the globe, In the physics of the universe, in the way I live my life, in
and out of meaning, The mammal, the boy, and me—we are one and the
same and different too— It means something to
me, but I can’t say what, and so, it means nothing to me Except, that at times like these,
perhaps, reason tends to sleep on the bottom of the sea.
I know there is no solid
state in the slow pounding of the surf; no rhyme or reason to these
stories of mine, or to the lost and found love that Blossoms and fails
between strangers, nor is there a scheme In the flight of
monarch butterflies — no real reason that can I see—Just a thing
they do now and then
But there is some reason
in the way dancers turn off their minds
and attend
to their bodies’ purring design while plying their audience with a
sense of rapture, of their freedom and grace, (which is relished) amidst
the sensuality and the workings of muscle and bones, yielding and
unyielding and beautiful, a function of unrelenting mechanics and
practice, and routine discipline—(relished, but invested with our
own themes and conceptual meanings and then ignored).
The dancer isn’t
really the dance is she? Somehow she merely swims around and is
swallowed whole by it. We are tantalized by the dancer, but somehow
separated from her by the very reasons we are tantalized.
While I am alone in the belly of the great gray
whale I find I enjoy this conjunctive relationship, this space between
the dancer and the dance, between me and the whale and the outside
world,
This phenomenon of movement and lyricism—it
speaks to me about the way I live my life, In the affective exchange
between others and myself, between absurdity and knowing I am blind
At times like these all
meaning and understanding become revelation or nonsense, depending upon
the speed at which we travel and our willingness to
connect, Or to learn the
choreography of the dance, of the boy, of the butterflies, of the whale,
of me
I sometimes wonder as I
am waiting here for the dance to begin, if there is a
construction of questions lying in wait for answers to fall like
raindrops in the desert in order to
reconstitute the meaningful things in the spaces between us? Sometimes it seems that
it is only with luck, coincidence, and synchronicity that any of
the truly significant exchanges in life are made at all, for so very
rarely is a truly creative
question posed and as rarely does the rain answer the call to dance.
It’s a touch and go
world, a harsh and beautiful truth of a world in which a god of
infinitesimal detail lives, but it’s a chaotic god that rules with
endless Confusion, heaping loads of unanswerable anxiety upon us,
which can only be relieved by the tacit acceptance of life’s
randomness, (which is sometimes rational and sometimes not).
As for the boy
separated in the middle o’ night I have tried and tried to join the
Conjunctive medium of television to his pain, the loss he suffered to
the salty sea, the treatment he received to his sleeping dreams,
the terror of being torn from his weeping life to the experience of
being swallowed up by the whale of television, and his perplexing joy at
his strange new connection to the world.
But TV records neither
the boy, nor the pain, nor the real separations he endured, only the conjunction of
events and objects in time and space—all of which Might have occurred
in limbo for all we knew, for it was only with the death of the whale
and its emergence from the deep that I did stand there finally, exhumed,
Looking largely in the face of things and
understand how I was connected to the child's Plight, I to the
great gray whale and I to the salty sea, felt at last the true weight of
the thing brought up from the depths and all-together around
me, Whose misunderstandings of life was betrayed—
There in the vast rot of the whale.
Copyright, By Terry R. Reid
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