F3-JAS3
The Day Old Dream
Copyright © by Jessica Schneider, 2/18/05
It is the oldest dream of man, this glimpse of the buzzard in mid-flight, recognized by one witnessing: creature with wings hanging over yesterday and each day since. It is the oldest form of man: the thought, and all that composes it. The bird glides by. I look to it and know this dream is older than I--this dream of flight, and for that I lag behind. It holds the beauty of thoughts and things, and goes on without the need for clarity. Perhaps it is this need for clarity that ruins. Advancing only though intellect, (although some would argue even that) despite this dream, we still cannot fly. The fearful field mouse is unaware the bird floats by, yet still this mouse has not forgotten its purpose: to propagate and stay alive. Once the bird circles near, however, the fields are a haven for all that stays hidden.
I went out one Sunday afternoon, and saw circling, this buzzard still overhead, seeming like it was going to land, but then changing its mind and circling again. It flashed its wings over trees, and loomed ominous the clouds, then returned, like something serene. But was it really? This I could not be sure. It flew overhead, and this time lowered itself a little more, but still it was out of reach. Uninterested in me, it went on, repeating orbit. It did not descend.
I had no idea how long it had been, and nor could I tell the amount of time this pattern would continue, so standing in my field of unknowing, with just me and the mice, we watched. It is easy to imagine this dream diffusing onto another, much in the way sounds and smells do. Carried by wind, arrives the smell of skunk, or the call of a rooster, or the modest flick of a grasshopper against our feet. Does the field mouse feel the same? Or how about the prairie dog buried below a field of flux? The young grow old, as do trees, preparing their purpose in becoming. Perhaps we underestimate their intellect- trees, prairie dogs, field mice--while overestimating our own. Not everything owns the dream of flight. Not everything owns this dream because stagnation is there in the form of stones, existing and there, imperishable, surrounded by the flecks of organisms that come and go, pressing in and out of things living or that which has already lived, inanimate stones upholding the history of having once been part of some creature. Running my fingers across its surface will no more smooth it into obscurity than that of the wind’s doing. Yet the stone will always be, as shapes have always been--looming in landscape.
Still standing below the buzzard, and looking towards the imaginary, I can see mountains are there. Perhaps they have always been these fixtures of mind? Forming through hundreds and thousands and millions of years by the weathering of sanded walls-- sandstone, granite, and elements composed by cosmos and wind, these same elements I know exist in myself as well. So where, then, in the speck of being do I exist? The organic chemistry of myself does not think, feel, or remember, for my carbon chains are not that which owns me. So what does claim my ownership if the smallest parts of myself are not really myself? Is my hand, once having lived as part of my body, no longer mine if removed by the smash of some boulder? Would the decomposition of myself exist as any less than that which has worked to compose me? Beginning with the smallest organisms one can imagine, the remainder of myself remains for them--food for several days--that is all. And it is only bone that will stay. But the decomposition of myself is not any less of what I am. The evolutionary ladder time has endured to bring me into being, inheriting all the traits of those humans around me--having formed now this thing I call myself, this thing with an ability to react to some other--this is what I have become. And yet, pull life from me, and I will dwindle, unrecognized, like that of a city after a hurricane--wiped away, identity gone in a few small moments whose duration is seemingly insignificant to that of time’s history, yet realizing that duration, large or small, does not matter when the processes of daily living must continue.
Take, for example, the small sparrow. Upon one of my afternoon runs, my eye caught the glimpse of some struggle. It was moving but I could not tell, from where I stood, what was going on. So I moved in a little closer, and could see it was a small brown sparrow, with white spots on its wings--a female that had become trapped by some green mesh used to grow new grass. Upon approach, her little mouth opened in panic, and she began to shift more violently, in attempts to break free.
“Calm yourself, little bird,” I told her. But her eyes were well aware of mine, and her cries carried fear. I reached down to examine closely what the problem was. Her right wing had become trapped--tied with the green netting. I lifted her up, and she calmed for the moment, probably too scared to squawk. Careful not to get my fingers near her open mouth, I avoided her beak and instead tried to pry the netting from her wing, but it would not come. I was going to have to cut it. Since I had no scissors on me, (I was, after all, on my afternoon run) I was going to have to run home and get them for her. Her life depended upon it.
“Wait here. I’ll be back,” I told her, as if she understood me. And it was then when I felt sad, for having left her there, with my own thoughts wondering what she might be thinking. Are birds capable of more than what they lead us to believe? Perhaps she thought I was abandoning her, and it would only be her writhing that may set her free. But perhaps she knew by then she was not going to able to escape alone. Perhaps she knew she needed me.
I raced home and went for the scissors. Into my car, I returned to her in a matter of minutes, searching for the strip that would not loosen. When she saw me again, she began to squawk impatiently and in fear, as if she wasn’t sure why I was there. Again, I reached for her feathers, and lifted them. I found the two pieces of netting that had become tangled around her wing. The scissors cut the first string, and she lifted herself in struggle, yet found she could not leave. The scissors cut the second string, and she lifted herself again, this time finding she was free--free to fly, to surge. Towards what I wondered? I suppose in that moment, not even she cared. In less than a second, she was gone. I looked down at the spot that claimed her for what appeared to be several hours. Her abandoned feathers were rampant and spread all over, and the netting jumbled and showed signs of struggle. I touched the spot and it still held her heat. Perhaps during the time her right wing bound to the earth, she experienced what our dream is like: our dream to fly. Here she spent several hours in her struggle to free herself, dreaming of flight, knowing she was capable, yet could not. From where did this buzzard, this little sparrow, first arise? And what forces led them to me? In thinking yet again about the smallness of myself and how that smallness cannot claim ownership of me, I imagined the smallness of my being dripping through the labyrinth of streets, flowing into a storm drain, becoming lost like that of the ball in John Berryman’s The Ball Poem. It is here where the speaker asks,
What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,