American eagle

I'm having a strange new love affair with time; time doesn't require as much from me as it once did. Very strange this feeling, not only the reduction of expectation as advised by the Buddha but a great desire to look backward instead of forward as once instructed by Sunday School teachers and a college professor or two..

Reading as much history as I can get my hands on--Jacques Barzun's tome on the rise of cultural decadence and Gombrich's sweet little book are primary sources. I've finally caught up to Alexander the Great, the Aristotelian, when I am informed by a story in The New York Times that women are better leaders than men. I'd thought this was common knowledge, the reason women were denied access in the first place to leadership positions; so that all of mankind could continue to test the limits of both idiocy and the merits of mediocrity as acheived by its male exemplers.

I do believe my life is changing, finally, I can feel it, not as proscribed by Rilke but by an unseen outside force that's creating a new interior landscape from which to consider certain and peculiar changed circumstances I find myself in. It's not to late for me to stop eating meat or doing other things that are both good for me and the earth! It's possible  vaccine still might be found that cures Republicanism! etc.

After a while I'm afraid written history doesn't hold much light, though it is somewhat reassuring to learn that the ancient Egyptians honored the dead and experimented with ointments until they found a potion that would preserve a mummy once it was wrapped in muslim. Nor were there any innocent good old days of poetry--poetry began in battle and blood and goes from there to fratricide, the heroes journey, Pax Romana, supernatural belief systems, the age of chivalry and troubadors, romanticism, Keats' death on The Spanish Steps, to the language centered twaddle spit out of highly sensitive word processors and published in Harriet Monroe's venerable old magazine.

At this juncture, history seems more like a series of memories that turn personal one-by-one. Somehow I actually have more storage space for memory these days, more room now for memories than ever before.

In Wyoming several years ago I watched as an eagle dive-bombed a snake, taking the snake first with its talons and then its beak and soar straight up into the air, drop the snake, while hovering at some height, on a boulder below, dive down again to snatch the snake once more in its beak, and repeat its previous action with bombadier precision. The eagle performed this aerial feat three times in a matter of minutes. After the third strike the eagle flew off with its prize, by then presumbably dead, to the Hall of the Mountain King where a great feast was enjoyed by all.

I watched this incident as if not believing what I'd just seen.

Sky with bird, May 16, 2020. China Beach, San Francisco. Photo by author.