Into the Void

Monkeys Not Seen seemed to be appropriate. Bailey White has a beautiful essay about a little boy who wishes to see a monkey, but the sheer excitement of the possibility of such a visit makes him so ill that it never happens. He spends his life thrilled by the near miss and imagining an intelligent, gentle creature, never knowing the reality of a caged, lonely, grouchy monkey. So much of life is the perception, not the reality, and the things we don't do somehow become luminous in our minds with some sheen of possibility, while so often we just see the flaws in the experiences we have had.

This feels a little odd, somehow. Like the first page of a new journal, there's the sense that I should say something profound, that I should make some meaningful statement. But it's not a day with much to say - clear sunshine, sleeping cats, faded quilts, dust piling up along the baseboards. Speaking, or writing, seems uncalled for, but otherwise there's just nothing. It's a still day in my little schoolhouse today. I can hear a cat breathing upstairs behind my nightstand, the tick of the crockpot on the kitchen counter, the hum of the dvr recording another Law & Order rerun. This kind of silence, at one time in my life, would have been filled with a burbling, muddy sluice of thoughts, but now, the interior of my mind is as still as the house, thoughts lined up on the floor of a clean internal room, like small, imperfect, nondescript pebbles. As a result, the urge to turn on a blaring soundtrack of 80s pop seems ridiculous - the image of Billy Idol screeching through the same internal room, for no one but a tidy line of stones seems bizarre, to say the least.

Sharing such thoughts seems odd, self-conscious, self-important, ridiculous somehow. Why do we do this, this cyber equivalent of scratching our name on a post, tucking a scrap of paper in a crack? An odd contrast between immortalizing our "monkeys not seen" and an apparent fear of a life passed unseen ourselves?