Saturday 13 January 2001
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Pic of the day: The old path is barely visible as a path anymore. It seems only a couple years ago that it was used many times a day. And now this ... fading away. Does the same happen to the pathways in our brain? Old paths
I took the old path down, Chris de Burgh, Heart of darkness, from the CD Power of Ten. ***Shopping groceries today was only a moderate success. The small shop had almost no strawberry yoghurt left, and no chocolate cookies. I planned to go to the other shop afterwards, but never got around to it before closing hours. I'm not sure what I spent that time with. I was rather sleepy and my mind was a bit fogged. Nothing seriously criminal, I am sure, but it may have been sinful. I can't remember. Oh yes, pasta dinner. That's not sinful. And a bit of chocolate. Well, that's dubious. But I'm pretty sure there was more. Well, I napped later and woke up from a dream which involved a school of gifted youngsters and an attempt to clone the Millenium Man.[1] But on my way to the shop I saw the old path, to the left of the new road that I walked, and I remembered. The old path wound its way among the trees; often I would jump from stone to stone or balance on a tree root so as to not plunge into mud if it had recently rained. Especially in the dark autumn nights, and there seems to have been lots of them at that time, it was hard to even find my way in the moonless blackness of the forest. In the beginning at last, I sometimes got off the path and took a few steps into the wilderness before I realized that I was no longer on the way home. Insert spiritual comparisons as needed. Back in the present, as I looked at the now nearly forgotten path with a photographer's eye, the song by Chris de Burgh rang out in my mind with surprising clarity. Then again he is one of my favorite songwriters, reflecting the immense span that a man's mind can encompass: From the mystic to the ridiculous, from selfless love to warlike hate, from tender care to rough lust. And always, the music and the words are written in the same spirit, so they strenghten one another. I recognize myself in it, even sometimes when I wish I didn't. And as the words came to my mind, I was once again drawn back in time, further back ... back to the mountain-shadowed valley where I grew up, a small farmboy in a big big world. ***The place I knew when I was young ... only a stretch of drained marsh separated our house from the beginning of the mountains. Behind the upper barn, the sheer cliffs rose like the castle of an unapproachable lord of the giant race. There were narrow bands of flat land in steps up along the mountainside, and between them vertical cliffs. The goats had somehow made a path between each of the ledges, and these goat paths were the ones I used the most. But sometimes I would try to climb up other places, for no other reason that my curiosity. I literally climbed where no one else had gone, neither man nor beast. And more than once it happened that I found when I had climbed a while, that I could not get back down the same way. I could not even see where to set my foot below me. And so, however impossible it seemed, I had to continue up. And in my fear, I had to carry on ... Some speculative scientists have proposed that there is a multitude of universes, that our universe divides whenever there are two possible outcomes of any one situation. I think that's entirely theoretical. Be that as it may, if it is so, then I suspect I am rare. I'm afraid such a multiverse would be littered with the skeletons of Magnus Itlands who have died a stupid, pointless death: Crushed on the cliffs below, cracked their skulls in bicycle accidents, got stuck in narrow places and whatnot. Not to mention those who succumbed to the asthma that held me in a stranglehold for much of my first decade. And some may even have died during a rampage of senseless violence during my younger years. I may be a rare thing indeed in the multiverse.
And in my fear, I had to carry on ***As I walked home from the shop, I walked up the hill. A still not rusty bicycle was lying by the roadside, where it lay this fall. I walked up a hill that was steeper than the one I walk to the bus stop, steeper then the one I walk around the neigborhood. It seems only weeks ago that I would have to stop every few steps to catch my breath and to allow my hammering heart some time to do its work, before I dared take a few more steps. What sayes Ecclesiastes: "...when men are afraid of heights and of dangers in the streets; when the almond tree blossoms and the grasshopper drags himself along and desire no longer is stirred. Then man goes to his eternal home and mourners go about the streets." That's pretty much how I felt. Then last fall I got sicker, and I lost 5-10 kilo, most of it during the penicillin treatment. And then my family asked me to come because my mother was getting rapidly worse. I went first to my oldest brother, who lived closest to the hospital, and I saw real age and real disease and the shadow of death. And after that I came to the farm where I was grown up, and the rooms of my parents were empty, and there were children running around the rest of the house. And the sun rose over the mountains and shone down on the hills I remembered from my own childhood. And I went outside and I felt the sun and the wind and I remembered. And I started to run, run with the wind, and I didn't die. Oh, I will, in time. But I didn't. Was it all in my mind? Perhaps. Or perhaps it was in my lungs. The sinusitis had been steady for at least two years, probably more, and was growing worse. I'm not sure how much the bacteria had afflicted the rest of my body before I finally caved in and took antiobiotics. Or it could be that 5-10 kilograms of fat do matter, strange as it sounds. I guess I shall not know in a long time. But right now my body feels reset from 70 to 40 again. I can only hope I don't do something foolish ... Yeah, right. And the moon on a silver platter. [1]The Millenium Man (or at least that particular Millenium Man) is copyright Al Schroeder. |
Another clear, chilly day. |
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