January 6, 2013

Epiphany.

Watching David Attenborough’s series about Mammals. The section about humans included a sequence of Bushmen hunting down a sable antelope, I think it was. They chose the bull because he was weighed down by his glorious horns, and would tire quicker. They followed in some place by sight and sign, but in other places by sheer empathy. Where would I have gone were I the antelope? As they followed, they danced, their hands making signals in the air, so as to keep silence. But the hand signals went on even when one of them was alone, a man talking silently to himself in the desert with one hand and his spear in the other. Perhaps he was talking to the gods. When he finally reached the antelope, it lay down in the dust of sheer exhaustion, and finishing it off was a gesture. The man then prayed over the beast and performed a ritual of sending in back to the earth. It was carried home, and everybody’s families ate for days. I thought as I watched two things, first that there was a time when being a man was very beautiful. The second was that must be inside us somewhere still, the profound empathy, the sublime and simple gesture.

I do not do what makes me happy. I thought that most recently last night, when I entered the gloomy living room and considered that I could have had one more night with my tree. Then why did I take it down? One more night would have made me happy. One more night would have been right, this being Epiphany only today. There is no answer to the question, other than to say I thought it might be worse later. That is, actually, a very bad reason for doing anything, and I’ve used more often than I should.

After a day away from the Internet, I had 148 new messages on my primary account. Two of those were actually about me, and not a solicitation of some kind.

Woke thinking of Ragnorak, the epic I wrote in Angle-Saxon alliterative verse when I was 15. Where is it now? I can still see it written in a thin brown notebook in the most meticulous hand I could gather to the task.