The Sphinx 2

The sphinx has seen them come and go. The strong and the wrong, the wise and the wicked, the haughty and the lowly. She has seen elegant structures and torrents of chaos. Great swirling embers of power, and heart, and loss. She has stood both outside the gate and inside the gate, and found them to be the same place. The sphinx has endured the chattering sandstorms of the ages, and has remained unmoved. In her defense, it must be noted that she is made of 270 tons of stone. The sphinx is mostly sedentary.

The sphinx has lived through alphabets and minarets, prophets and parapets; she has emerged smoothened and wizened and so free of fear. She has eaten the choking dust of memory and been fed. She has seen breadths of time lap against impossibly distant shores and even still, she has not yet seen everything. Why is there always something new? What fresh momentum moves these crossing currents, turns these driving wheels, dances these many, many feet?

It's worth considering that the sphinx may not know. Her tears are long dried, baking daily in the punishing heat. For all her years, what has she accrued beyond survey? Her untold wrinkles are untelling. What has she seen but the sights? The world is set in motion, adrift but alight, and our human countless nows weigh nothing.

Our time is weightless but our actions have force. We can run circles around the sphinx, but we can also run forward. Run ecstatic, run through the gates, run in time as though time could never catch up. No, the sphinx does not know. She will never blink or lift a paw. We are the ones, the sands that blow, and breathe, and build.

the equator

We were learning about geography the other day, about physical boundaries versus political, when it struck me (for the first time) that the equator doesn't exactly exist. The equator is an imaginary line. Imagine! The borders of nations, like the borders of states and cities and etcetera, are imaginary as well. While we're at it, money is imaginary too, but through consensual hallucination, it is agreed upon to be real, though temporary. Like breath.

We take about six hundred million breaths in a lifetime. If eleven hundred people could breathe dollars for all of their seventy one years, we'd have a bailout package. It's like a t-shirt I saw on a corpse the other day: "Pain is weakness leaving the body." Do you feel stronger yet? Or are you pain-free, yet weak? I can imagine.

If you're anything like me, there was something in your childhood room that scared you. For me, it was a block, from the bin of blocks. This one wasn't a cube or conic or cuboid, but flat on two ends and oddly bent and unevenly curved in the middle. Once, in the throes of fever, I imagined that evil block filling my room up with gurgling otherness that flowed and pinned me tightly to the bed. Because I was a child, I never considered getting rid of it, though. Today, I see this block (as I write) and I see its long-dormant discomfort, the craft of its woodwork, and I see now it looks like a horse's front leg.

Physical boundaries are real, but vary with the changing landscape and are thus not entirely objective. Surprising! that the surface of the Earth, the solid ground you stand upon even now, is open to interpretation, while the imaginary lines of government are true, demonstrable, and held fast in the arms of the law. While we're at it, the law is real, temporary and consensual, but cops hate it if you call the law a hallucination. If you - Umm...I was just watching two women going through my recycling bin, picking out the aluminum cans. The fundamentals of the economy. Sorry, where was I?

If you're anything like me (though I do pray you are not), you are wishing fervently for things to stop happening. What is the deepest part of the ocean? Can I go there and hear nothing about anything, or will the other human-hewn waves, of radio and HD and satellite and cellphones sift their way downwards, where the information (sinking and clinging to the side of chinese Hannah Montana flotsam like the opposite of white blood cells) reveals itself to be a revolution of no reveal, late-breaking news both late and broken, unmissible and unmissed. Can we pour the emptiness, or fullness, of these days into this trench of deep, imaginary, sweet stasis?

Where am I going with all of this? Now you ask! OK, let's say you are holding a live wire and you wish to describe it. You hold it in your hands and it rattles your brain, melts the rings on your fingers, and rolls your eyes back into your head. Though you are robustly aware of an undeniable feeling of live-wire-ness, you'll likely have trouble coherently depicting this feeling. It's a lot like life. The experience itself has made unreliable your testimony of the experience.

It's sometimes said that your freedom ends where my nose begins. Personal boundaries are imaginary but certainly real. Personal space varies by culture - Latin cultures require less, European more. Cut me in half, though, and it would reveal more about me than about you, I imagine. The equator divides as it conjoins. But it doesn't properly exist, so no, it's not like us at all.