I was working out a plot point and I took a post-midnight walk.  I was on the more vegetated portion of campus, trees and bushes and shadows and places to sit.  There were three naked flag poles and a blowing wind.  The wind strummed the flagpoles and produced noise.  The thicker pole took the wind, maybe the wind rattled inside the hollow of the pole…or it whipped the rope around (I don’t know), making a noise like a deep, deep didjeridoo.

 

You know what a didjeradoo is…even if you don’t.  It’s one of those Australian aboriginal instruments, a big pipe, made of wood that you blow and below in (halfway between a trombone and a kazoo).  It makes a noise that sounds a bit like whales humping…with a little less deep bass.

 

Wuhuhuhuhahahahaowowowowooooooooowowowooooooooo…

 

Pole one made this noise.  Pole two’s ropes were blowing and the metal attachments kept smacking the pole, in staccato bursts of percussion, like a drum…but with an echoey-metal bend at the end.

 

Chawah-wah-wah-wah…

Chawah-wah-wah-wah…

Chawah-wah-wah-wah…

 

And these, in fairly normal intervals, with a little bit of variation and improvisation, made a sort of music.

 

Wuhuhuhuhahahahaowowowowooooooooowowowooooooooo…

Chawah-wah-wah-wah…

Chawah-wah-wah-wah…

Chawah-wah-wah-wah…

Wuhuhuhuhahahahaowowowowooooooooowowowooooooooo…

 

I listened for a while, waiting for the third pole to enter into the song.  It never did.  I ended up leaving.  But I’m still convinced the third pole plays a solo…I just didn’t get to that part in the opus.

 

Several, bat-winged thoughts fluttered in my head, afraid of bright light and I had to wander to the less lit areas so they’d settle and I could pin them down, make sense of them.  I nabbed a couple…which did not turn out to be thoughts about the plot I was working on, and in the struggle, the thoughts that were about the current work, fluttered away, cackling in the yew trees.  So I had to make do with what I did capture…

 

Thoughts of a Neil Gaiman’s comic book that won a prestigious short fiction, literary award…and the stony gray-beards who found this so shocking and scandalous, that they changed the rules so that, in the following years, no mere graphic novels could ever sully their presumptuous waters again.  Thoughts of the teeney-bop pack of girls I saw in Barnes & Noble, in the magazine section, finding out, with bated breath, what was going on between Pit and Jolie, the alpha bimbo proclaiming to her pack, “Like, I would ever read a whole book?” and the rest of them, realizing prestige points were on the line, all agreeing, with giggles, proclaiming, proudly, in a book store, of their partial illiteracy.  The occasional, lazily disgusted looks, creative writing students sometimes get from some lit scholars, as if they’re conmen getting away with something (well…it’s true…we are…and more than they realize…but this does not demean our intelligence).  Thoughts of those folks who cringe at the mention of anything “popular” and demand that the only worthwhile art has dust all over it.  Thoughts that anything: ugly buildings, whores, politicians, and poorly written poetry, get respect if they live long enough.  The hipster, neo[fill-in-the-blank] crowd who think anything past its 15 sec. expiration date is worthless, and drone on and on and ON (like flies fucking) about “avant-garde” this and that, this piece of “art” made by a neo-Buddhist-Eskimo-pagan-platypus who urinated blood on a spattered canvas or that random jumble of words, randomly pulled from a thesaurus, and called a “poem,” and what can pass for “hip” and “new” and “intellectual” these days.  Thoughts on “old-fashioned” and what that means.  Thoughts on “new” and what that means.  Thoughts on “timeless” and what that means.

 

The bats came to some conclusions, before I let them go.  “Old-fashioned” just means you’re not fashioned old enough – that being stuck in an anachronism really just means your stuck on a thought that is only decades or a century old – that if you go back far enough, you find things new because time and thought move in revolutions and spirals and leading a “revolution” just means your doing something really-really-really-really old, not new – that being stuck on the avant-garde is the same as old-fashioned, equally intellectually flaccid, both being stuck in an anachronism, one slightly older than the other and in the total stream of time, both are only an imperceptible bit of space apart.  Being “timeless,” concluded the bats, is leaving the stream and touching the eternal, making old stories new, using “fresh” archetypes that are really variations of archetypes mystics sang about, around the fire, while everyone ate barbequed mastodon.  Then you’re timeless and you stumble on the names of ancient gods.  Then you realize that both QUALITY and CRAP have no notion of the difference between different times and different genres and flow freely into all of them.  Then you know that, in the grand scheme of things, in the comparison of all the things in the universal continuum, high-epic language, Shakespearean sonnets, and the blues are hardly very different.  Then you are unafraid to read a comic and call it literature – read The Epic of Gilgamesh and unembarrassed to call it cool.  You’re perfectly comfortable telling tales about figures from Greek tragedy singing duets with stuffed animal rabbits who smoke weed, about the evils of genocide…and infomercials.

 

Now, you’re a word shaman.

Now you’re flyin’.