We’ve fallen down and over the other
side. Rats to who sees us now.
He stumbles upon our camping ground (which
is no certified, family-friendly place, but a cleared patch in a fine,
untouched clearing), un-phased at first and expecting routine communications
with a group of perhaps rowdy, perhaps antisocial, perhaps petty-law-breaking
strangers; but what he finds is something a little bit more than all this. Poor Dave, a sheltered, country type, innocently
going about his routine duties, encounters a group of people who, to him at
least, appear to be completely out of their minds—moonfolk, if you will.
He is immediately intimidated, acutely
perplexed.
Hiding behind some waist length shrub, he
removes his cliché rangers’ hat and peers over into the strangers’ hearth, and
observes.
What they say seems incoherent, barely
consistent (mostly inconsistent) and often completely disjointed; they shuffle
about like confused cavemen, muttering and performing actions which seem to
have no reason at all; they scream and yell and make strange jokes, jokes which
Dave would not even recognise as jokes if it weren’t for the group’s ecstatic
laughter following whatever was just said—a veritable bush circus, composed of
alien beings from the watery orb in the sky, disoriented and out of control…
How does Dave even begin to address this?
What reaction could possibly counter this savage display?
He flees.
Figuratively and literally.
These
creatures are effeminate, degenerate; they’re acting out of etiquette.
The words chorus from some collective pit in
his mind, more like a chant than his own words; but he knows them to be true,
there is vehemence behind them and a thoughtless passion—faith, perhaps. Considerations even enter Dave’s mind, to
alert some sort of psychological authority; to have the pack rounded up and put
into the back of a van like stray dogs, sent away to be cured of their myriad
manic maladies, or at least to be placed out of sight if said illnesses prove
incurable.
Which emergency number to ring for lunatics? NASA?
It is all too much for Dave, too
unfathomable and too strange; there is no order here, no sense, no logical
sequence of occurrences. And so he
dawdles home in a strange delirium, dumbfounded by this group of cackling neo-savages,
whose mental states seem to have taken a willing waltz into the endless
sky. He goes home to his wife and as he
gets into bed, unintentionally waking her, tells her a yarn, “Honey, I’ve just
seen the darndest thing…”—because by telling it as a story it becomes detached,
loosened as dirt away from the solid earth on which it occurred. Mrs Ranger Dave opens her drowsy eyes and
listens intently to her husband’s yarn, takes in the story and agrees
whole-heartedly with Ranger Dave’s vague sentiments regarding the strange
group. The two think a few minutes about
these, the strangest strangers, before lulling off into a dreamless sleep, the
account falling away into vagueness.
The world is normal again; everything is
fine; the sun always rises, will always rise—tomorrow is another day.
Back at the crater (camp) it is common
knowledge that tomorrow never comes. Tomorrow never does come. All that exists is the dynamic, thunderbolt
flow of chaotic interaction, the mirroring of the external and the internal, an
omni-pervasive pull into what is there and then and always going, incessantly
arising and inter-arising and reflecting and engaging. Moments of emphatic purity as trees sing and
chant primal rhythms to the moods of the humans, minions of nature, nature
itself, jumping about in a newfound freedom of detachment and green uniformity—all
this, just as waves lap.
Had Ranger Dave interrupted the ritual, two
worlds might have violently clashed, but (perhaps) only one would reign over
the other. Which would be the victor is most
interesting to speculate upon but, ironically, it was the authoritarian figure
of Ranger Dave who fled from the freedom-mongers (hypothetically, anyway),
unable to place them in good conscience into his rigid, fixed, occluded
worldview—and not the other way around.
Only one party doubled back, baffled, saw sin. And it wasn’t the happy campers.
Only one party was/is unaware that there are
not two parties, but one—perhaps that’s why they didn’t notice Dave, who stood,
explicit in the moonlight, a few metres away from the burning glow, the
centre. The light did reach him, but his
attention was elsewhere.
These were degenerates, right here; people
of the moon with lunar tics creeping and crawling from head to toe, unable to
see the ways of propriety, good manners, decent behaviour—creatures rather than
Men. And so here, the night ran on, the
streams of the great Stream rippling and splashing and dancing in the moon and
fire-light, nothing else existing but they and their surroundings—and the
network of Everything which extends from this.
Dave sleeps dreamlessly, while the travelers dance.
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