LAST MINUTE MUSINGS

by Hugh M. Lewis

The world had a beginning

And this beginning could be the mother of the world

When you know the mother

Go on to know the child.

After you have known the child

Go back to holding fast to the mother,

And to the end of your days you will not meet with danger.

(Verse LII, Book Two of the Tao Te Ching, D.C. Lau, 1963:113)

We are confronted by many earthbound dilemmas in the modern world that are not easily solved. Cultivation of our sense of earth being depends upon our ability to at least partially resolve some of these dilemmas in our lives.

There is a very real sense that we can act in local ways to affect global changes, but only if we adhere strictly and unswervingly to the paths we set for ourselves. "Act locally, think globally" has become the earthbound dictum of our age. If we can by our actions set examples that influence others to act in similar ways, we can achieve a groundswell--a genuine "earth movement" that can have lasting, worldwide impact.

There is a sense that our earthbound dilemmas are now inescapable, and set for us a new moral order, albeit one that is ecologically inscribed and that transcends all previous moral systems. We can legitimately claim that seeking out a greater sense of earth being in our lives is not just a right or a privilege of our exercise of freedom. It becomes a responsibility to do so, if this means overcoming and controlling the compulsions and violence that otherwise dominates our worlds.

Even the exercise of freedom, as a right, becomes a responsibility that is tied up with our sense of earth being and its realization on earth. Freedom of thought, of imagination, of speech, of values and life-style, is central and paramount to the achievement of a sense of balance and harmony in the world that is the essence of earth being.

Thus, if working for a bomb factory that produces pollutants and that saps precious raw resources is inherently destructive of the earth, then we have the right to choose not to work for the factory, but the responsibility to chose otherwise. If working within a global industrial system entails participating in the continuing destruction of the earth's fragile ecology and the systematic wasting of its resources, along with the lack of realization of human potential, then we also have a concomitant responsibility not to define our lives according to its powerful dictates.

And yet the coercion of money is there--the need to make a living, survive and prosper within the larger system, no matter how destructive it might be. It plays, in a global system, an unavoidable and predominately coercive part in our lives. It structures and even predetermines our actions and responses in ways we cannot easily resist.

Even the paper on which this work is printed represents a destructive incursion into the natural order that may be better avoided. If we eat less red meat and more poultry and stock fish, if we eat less overall, then we are contributing in a small way to cultivation of a wider sense of earth being. If we use less paper, and we take fewer plane flights in our lives, and walk more often, then we are also contributing to an enlightened sense of earth being. If we grow our own vegetable patch, no matter how small, then this is better than buying vegetables shipped from across the country.

Whether or not these kinds of things are sufficient to turn the tide of battle is the crux of the future war that humankind must fight. We are faced with powerful profit making organizations who manipulate our values and worldview through the media and convince us, among many other things, of our right to possess automatic weapons and to kill small animals. I used to hunt as a boy. I used to fish along the coasts and inland oceans. I have given up both because there are fewer fish and game in the world. Now I much prefer the use of a camera, even though this itself is destructive, and so I take photographs only rarely. I lament the rabbits and quail and doves that I have unnecessarily killed in my youth, and would never do it again.

We must turn our swords into ploughshares, and render the pen our most powerful weapon. By setting examples in our everyday lives, we become the example for a new possibility of being on earth, one that is inherently less destructive and asynchronous with the natural order. This is our earthbound responsibility, the path toward realization of our earth being.

Now all I do anymore

is to spin my web of words

everyday I am at my weaving machine

everyday my webs grow longer and longer

hoping to catch someone up within its entanglement

it has been a lonely web I've woven

empty of its pray

like a spider

everyday

it is all I can do

to continue spinning and weaving

my long strands of words together

patiently waiting for some hapless victim

to fall within its lair

I've given up on most every other way

I can no longer build mountains

from minor mole hills

or reinvent the wheel

or play with fire

my webs refract the light but poorly

always trying to figure out some new design

to catch up the light

to create new rainbows of color

new patterns of line and shadow

playing with the sun and shade

everyday a different pattern

a different topography of meaning

a novel approach

though no pray strike within my lair

I've come to enjoy my daily spinning

an epigrapher I've become

writing last one liners

row after row

time upon time

day by day

everyday knitting epigraphs

about everything and anything

transforming all reality

epigrammatically

upon a type-faced

two dimensional paper world

commemorating the dead

celebrating life

commiserating the sad and tragic

in basic Anglo-Saxon

conferring a solidity of meaning

concretizing ideas

conceits and other fictions

as if they were of some stone-like substance

I cannot help my epigraphic tendencies

It is a curious sort of madness

an obsessive-compulsive fixation

upon the keyboard of the typewriter

commentary and critique

of generalia divers and sundry

I do not know why I do it

except that it helps me to continue

like a clock that marks my passing

into small meaningful units

composing my life

coping with death

Human being in the mirror

another person in a reversed world

the reversed world of the other

seen through the silver window

of a looking glass reality

a strange, alien being

with a wild look in the eyes

and a queer

but familiar expression

upon the face

we think we see our own reflection

but it is only the trick

of our ego in mimicry

of our transparent vanity

and looking-glass illusion

stranger in silent, perfect pantomime

of our every gesture

our every move

so self-impressed are we

that we fail to see the other's impression

upon the smooth surface of our reality

we cannot imagine what it is like

to be looking from the inside out

our fingertips touch in cold identity

at the interface of our glassy essence

of our shared reality

we speak but cannot hear

what the others are saying

catching it off guard

from out of the corners of our eyes

When we redouble the mirrors

upon our own being

we open up the doors of infinity

in the presence of alternative possibility

frames within frames within frames

diminishing forever into hyperbolic space

at that frozen moment

we create an endless bridge between two worlds

a physical window onto our inner reality

redoubling the mirrors

we create the abyss of our own being

an infinitude of simultaneous selves

looking into the time tunnel of eternity

we come then upon the edge

of the labyrinth of our understanding

looking along our own horizons

seen for once as a parallel point of perspective

turning the mirrors upon themselves

we momentarily forget the possibility

of our own presence

absorbed we become

in the glassy illusions of our reality

each frame is broken upon the edge

by the frame which it contains

each successive image is incomplete

filled in only by our multiple imaginings

turning the mirrors upon our selves

we learn the lesson

of our own depth of vision

and of our own fragile superficiality

turning this way, then that

there is ultimately no escaping

Why is written in the wrinkles

whispered in the wind

why is where the world began

and where it will end

why is the way the water falls from the sky

and washes down the hillside

why is a dream that sleeps in silence

It is the solitude we feel

when we are alone

why is a life that's full of death

and death that's full of life

why waits patiently

while everything else changes

and still remains when all else passes away

a newborn baby screams why

at the top of its lungs

we breath why

every moment of our being

and it parts us

when we come to our end

why is the laughter

that comes with the tears

and the tears that flow with laughter

why rises with the sun and the moon

and shines forth from every star

why sits upon every horizon

whys is the victor's demise

and the final victory of the defeated

why is found in the proud person's ignorance

and in the poor person's lessons

why cannot be measured by money

or weighed by material things

it cannot be explained in theory or by science

and does not wait for words