OPENING MOMENTS

by Hugh M. Lewis

When the best student hears about the way

He practices it assiduously

When the average student hears about the way

It seems to him one moment there and gone the next;

When the worst student hears about the way

He laughs out loud.

If he did not laugh

It would be unworthy of being the way.

(Line 90, Verse XLI, Tao Te Ching, Translated by D.C. Lau)

The first line drawn, the first cut made, the first word spoken, after which everything else must follow, before which everything was silent, unspoken potential--the rough uncarved block.

I went to a busy bar with an anthropologist last evening. Through all the cigarette smoke I spied the profile of a man looking curiously like Homo Erectus. He sat there silently, serenely sipping his beer, casually ignored by all the people around him. I asked him where he had been hiding all these many years. He told me that he had been dwelling deep in the center of a mountain, meditating upon the shadow images cast upon the cave walls. He was a soft-spoken, gentle-eyed sort of creature, beneath all his long gray whiskers. He asked me how it was the world had changed so much, and why, and I could not give him any clear answers.

I told an old Archaeological acquaintance that with all our new industrial might we waged a long, devastating and fruitless war against an ancient, autochthonous civilization, perhaps many thousands of years old. And we were defeated--not by the weakness of our arms, but by the weakness of our hearts, our spirit and our morality. A poor, ancient, long settled civilization beat us in a bloody conflict not because of their military might, but by the strength of their hearts, their will and conscience.

I sat before a committee of four well-established Anthropologists, to prove to them my worth to be in their PhD program. One asked me what I thought was the most important problem for Anthropology. I replied that there needed to be a shift of attention from the problem of where we had come from to the more pressing problem of where we are headed in our world.

I walked home in the dusk with all the words of the evening still racing through my mind. The setting sun cast long shadows across the land and was blinding as I walked directly towards it. At least for the time being, I knew where I was headed.

The committee of four had asked me what I believed the reason for being of Anthropology had been. I mentioned something vague about the appreciation for humanity, and one of them responded with something about being romantic. I said not romantic, not scientific, but the basic aesthetic experience of human reality--however absurd, tragic, brutish or beautiful.

I did not have all the answers. I told them I did not know who the greatest Anthropologist had been, and that I didn't have a father figure in the field. I only had a lot of unanswered questions and some serious doubts about my own small world.

I left the room and waited in the hallway. I heard their muffled voices argue over my fate, and then my primary advisor came out and congratulated me for passing. They all came out and shook my hand, and then quickly departed. My advisor told me I needed to take care of a few loose ends, and that he would write for me a shopping list of courses to take. Later he asked me what I would have done if I had failed and I told him I really didn't know, except perhaps to wander off somewhere.

I remember not having much to do that day before the exam. I got ready too early and just waited around trying to kill time. I didn't want to start anything I couldn't finish before the exam.

I enjoy sitting next to old TJ's tombstone

Whenever I get a chance inbetween times

I take my watch off my wrist

And slip it into my pocket

I look up into the tall green oak trees

And the blue skies with the wind blowing

The tall white columns stand silently

Like old, weather worn megaliths

Across the green, people promenade in slow motion

The old red brick buildings surrounding

A small corner of American History remaining

It could be ten or twenty or even a hundred years before

The same sunshine that glints from the roof tops

Glinted there many times before

So many days long since passed and forgotten

People walk by, in a hurry to be in class

Oblivious of the same day

That went this way many times before

I sit by the water fountain

On a warm sunny day

The sound of the water spilling

In a continuous cascade

The white foam floating in its blue center

And the fine mist of the wind's spray

Catching a small piece of a rainbow

It calls me back to previous times

In previous years perhaps

Or maybe in previous lives

Something strangely familiar

About the vibrant confusion

A mood, a wisp of a feeling

The sun against the skin

The spray upon the cheek

The rhythm of the gurgling water

Carrying me back to other times

And other places

And though lonely in an anonymous crowd of students

I do not feel alone

In the company of my mysterious memory

I had a dream last night

In that dream I was in a desert

One that I had been in before

In other dreams

In other realities

I was quite familiar with the lay of the land

With the rising hills

And the low lying scrub

In the hills, there was a dwelling

Made of stone, cut back into the hillside

And I had known that dwelling

Many times before

I awoke from that dream

With a sense of having lived

In a different life

In a distant place and time

I walk along the sidewalks

In the late afternoon

The sun upon my back

The wind blowing gently across my face

Strange and subtle feelings

Begin to flow in the stillness within

Mysterious ghost feelings

Rise and subside

Deja vu of something sensed

Previously experienced

Another presence faintly-felt

A distant voice echoing

Within deep interior corridors

A nervous spasm of the knuckles

A slight pinching pain on the forearm

A twitching muscle in the eyelid

Something calling me back again

The focus of my attention

Vacillating between now and then

This and that

Slipping silently away again

From the moments immediate grasp

I recall a different sense of being

In a different body

In a different world

With the same sunshine and the same gentle wind