Celestial Swallows and the Star of Beauty
I couldn’t tell if it was already late or if it was just starting to get late. But lateness was on the menu, that much was certain. Did it matter? Somehow it did since the feeling wouldn’t let up, the feeling of being late, or the feeling of being about to be late. Late for what? There were no immediate appointments or pressing chores left undone, not as far as the eye could see. So it became necessary to do some digging, some investigative work. This wasn’t journalism school so the five W’s would be a silly way to start. But the words “who” and “when” concerning the feeling of lateness kept coming up. Who was late? Who was about to be late? And when were they on time so much that being late now is making such a head-achy situation come to a head? Who? Who? or is it whom? Whom? It depends on the sentence, or so we’re told. The sentence, it depends on the sentence that is passed down, it determines the procedure that is to be followed in matters of structure. Structures — guillotine, wall, gallows — places all where sentence structure comes to bear upon the who and the when. Lateness becomes a glaring reality in these places, too late, too late, not just a little bit late, or about to be late, but so late that there is virtually no lateness left to talk about. The jig is up as the who goes down.
The linear progression of time has confused countless people over the millennia. Mainly because everyone can see there is no real time, there is only a dream time that we insist on calling real. Nothing moves forward in any sort of direction, rather, everything moves in spirals and circles and circumambulations, and even though this fact is clear as day (a day that goes around and around in circles as it gets late and grows dark and gets early and grows light again and it does this again and again and again), everyone still feels the effects of linear time as though it was a straight shot, an arrow to the heart. But even arrows move in curved arcs as any good huntress will tell you. What is it with straightness that gets our goat so much? And who is it that insists on the straight and the narrow? Who? Who? Who goes around and around the problem of straightness (which comes with the problem of time) and gets your goat? And when is all this taking place? In which time? In which where? Ah, here comes another w. Not just who and when, but now, also, where. Where is the time (the when-ness) unfolding and for whom? There is no way to get into reasoning until this much is established, no way to ask why. It’s way too early for why. Therefore, back to the straight and the narrow we go: can there be a when without a whom? Is the problem of time not your particular problem, the one who feels lateness creeping up like a deluge of demons, a tardiness suddenly personified and abruptly innumerable? A veritable army of delay, jammed up and unpunctual, dragging its legion-like feet, slowing everything down to the point of almost total arrest?
Time comes with light. They need each other since what’s the point of time if you can’t see anything? If everything is black and dark and unseeable, what difference does it make what time it is? In darkness, there is no when. It’s always the same hour. Only light can bring visibility to things so that visible things start to look different from each other. In darkness there is no why, either, but it’s still too early for that arrow. In fact, it may be easier to admit that it may never be time for why. “Why?” has no light and is, therefore, an unnecessary redundancy (see above). Let’s see now, where were we? Ah, yes: who? Who? Who feels harrowed by the sense of declining time? The ending of time and the coming of darkness since we have already established that without light, there is no time, so if time ends, it means the light has died. But that’s the reason of “why” creeping in again, did you see that? Very clever, very sneaky. “Why” always wants to find some reason for everything. But there’s not always a reason. There isn’t any reason lurking behind the way things move in spirals and circles, no reason that circumambulation is the way of the world.
Someone is standing back there waving reason’s freak flag, trying to get my attention but I keep ignoring her. I’ve met that chic before, man, she’s nothing but trouble. She’s not even a she, she’s a He pretending to be a she. (S)he thinks I’ll like her better if she’s a she and she’s not wrong about that, but I’ve already discovered her subterfuge and am now thoroughly annoyed. That cause is lost, it was born lost. Trying to answer the questions of dark timelessness with the reason of “why” is strictly for the birds and even they are too good for it, especially barn swallows — they’re too good for virtually everything. I think they were circumambulating some celestial star of beauty and accidentally got stuck in the orbit of time, got dragged down here to twitter away at us angrily, demanding recompense for the unhinged state of affairs.
The end of time and the coming darkness is a frequency swallows can feel in their bones. Circling around a star of beauty is the only real occupation fit for a swallow and obviously, it involves a great deal of starlight. As the gloomy darkness gathers, they grow uneasy, and they need to escape, somehow, the feeling of lateness that creeps up on them like a black woolen blanket thrown over the cage to keep them quiet, to keep them from singing their song.
