Thursday, October 27, 2011

Fetal Attractions

You have been attracted to things from beyond the womb, a condition that has remained with you as far back as your memory reaches into the past and as far ahead of you as the future holds.

When you are attracted to someone or something, it is as though you have stumbled into a linear accelerator, wherein your molecules were rearranged, speeded up, and sent rushing at some target just beyond your view.  You are aware of energy, as if from an extra cup of foamy latte.  There is the sense within your interior of a high school hallway, just as the last bell rings.  Some students can hardly await the thought of escape velocity.  Others still radiate with the energy of excitement at having understood something that matters to them.

Attraction is energy, building up, boiling, boiling over; it is curiosity on steroids.  You feel yourself being drawn, trying to maintain your sense of restraint and decorum.  If the object of your attraction is a person, you try to take some counter measure against seeming to swarm in close, looking about for some other thing for a momentary focus. Sometimes, when you are attracted, you are yanked back into earlier ages, when attraction was as reflexive a response as the doctor, tapping your knee now with a robber mallet before smiling the good news at you that your reflexes are splendid, thank you.

A particular something you find attractive is the idea, some vision that comes visiting as a result of a few collisions before your eyes, reminding you how concepts often progress beyond arithmetic progression, into the square and cube roots, where they invite you to dance even though you may not dance or seem not interested in the way you already dance but wish instead to lead you on to something more imaginative.  The attraction of ideas carry with them the aura of the sexual, the aesthetic, the artistic, the brave articulation of a sentence or a line, rendered as you may never have experienced it.

During the course of a day, you may be attracted by all of the individual senses or combinations of them, a dazzle of chemistry that reaches far beyond itself because of its ability not only to amaze, possibly even stun, but as well to evoke previously unvisited plateaus.

You are of course defined by what attracts you, sometimes in ways that cause you to experience a moment’s worth of comfort at the image of your yearning, curious, hungry self, this id-like creature, this child wearing the adult suit of male pattern baldness, sophisticated tastes, and plunked right down in the middle of all these such things from his childhood as radio drama, Necco-Wafers, Big Little Books, big band jazz, and the blue notes, the thirds, fifths, and sevenths, played a tad under the major scale, sounds that seem to speak to you when you are wondering where you stand in the universe and want some way of memorializing it.

Attraction sometimes presents itself to you as an ideal, some momentarily finite flash of a place or condition to which you not only believe you can aspire, you rather wish with all your heart to find ways to be there.

You have heard it said from a number of sources that attractive things and individuals will ultimately betray you because you will see through their mysteries, find the places where they have been redone, painted over, patched, mended.  You know for a fact because a Navajo weaver told you this herself, that the rug is a finite vision of a sand painting.  As such, it must not be perfect for such things cannot be allowed to remain intact longer than the time required for them to carry forth their message.  The rug has errors, mistakes woven in.  You like the notion of yourself as attractive in spirit or temperament, as opposed to mere physicality.  You do not carry with you the equipment with which you were born.  Things have been somewhat rearranged.  You are the literary equivalent of a Navajo rug, mistakes introduced so that, in a lovely reverse calculus, you may broadcast your message, your vision.  It is a vision that has come to you from being attracted to some persons, places, and things, indifferent to others, and unimpressed by others.  In so many ways, it has been instructive to see how many things you can do without, now that you have been recast, and how such unexpected great hordes of things attract you. You are moving toward the lectern, simultaneously attracted by and curious to know of what you will speak.


1 comment:

Storm Dweller said...

I much prefer your laws of attraction over that self-help jibe. Are we really repelled by anything as much as we are simply attracted to something else?