“You asked about some weird concept you called “etiquette” and spoke about “proper behavior.” You are indeed out of date. You must think first of yourself and how you will look to those around you. You see, the better you look the more proper is your behavior. Here, the more material belongings you display, the better you look. And the busier you declare yourself, the more important you look. The more medicines you let people know you take, the more effete you become. Also, the more you lie about your achievements, your interests, your children, your pets, the cooler you become. Other Boomers around you are lesser in importance, not to be respected, but to be ignored, for this rule says you are number “uno,” and the care stops there.
“That’s another rule: Boomers run the world, so forget about those older and those younger, unless they are Boomer children. You see, we Boomers blame you for not bringing us up properly, for all our problems, for the wars, for the peace, for the ills of society. They label you as hypocrites for your contrasting beliefs, old-fashioned for your dress and your tastes, and “really out of it as to what is actually cool.” And they look down on the newer generations as inferior to them, because they chose a time too late to be born, and as well ‘they couldn’t possibly be cool—they weren’t at Woodstock.’”
The Distant Mountain Beyond Delphi
Delphi, the home of the Wise and Forecasting Oracle of Ancient Greece, was once deemed to be the Center of the Known World, much as Washington, D. C. might in today’s world be cast.
That evening, in the dusk at Delphi I looked up to the West. There, mysteriously high on the slopes of a mountain far, shone a light—like a shadow-causing street light mounted on a telephone pole above an old and decaying train depot in a Midwestern US town—shinning ever so dimly, yet this evening conveying its illumination across the Grecian miles to me, standing there as I was in that clear and crisp dusk in Delphi, Greece.
There appeared to be a road—probably, or for sure, dirt—running up the slope and underneath the light, and on each side some buildings—houses, certainly—in which people and likely their animals, separated apart by a mere wall, lived day after day after day.
I stared on and on as time went by, wondering, imagining as to the wisdom, or lack thereof, inhabiting the minds of the people of that almost inaccessible village—yes, as I looked and examined every aspect of the visual image, it was most certainly a village. How one made their way there, if one wanted to for some reason or other, remained unclear as no highway, road or even a narrow donkey track leading from Delphi across the distance traced a meaningful or mapable course from Delphi to the illuminated location.
I thought: there, in that remote little village must surely exist the wisdom of the universe—a person or persons hiding out there, who possessed a Shangri-la-like understanding—yeah, the sought-after knowledge of the meaning of the universe, of our lives, of our reasons for being where we are, who we are and what we are. There, in that remote village were The Answers. Yes, they must be there, in the mind and voices of the bare-roots farmers and the sheepherders, of those all-knowing visionaries who lived there—there in that isolated village because they were ostracized from Athens, yes, and even from Delphi. I must travel there! For on that remote mountain slope lay the answers to life, to the universe, to the spiritualism of ancient Greece, modern Greece and to the modern world.
Mount San Antonio
Mount San Antonio rules the central border between New Mexico and Colorado, overseeing the vast San Luis Valley to the north and the deep Rio Grande Gorge to the east. Fall colors of the Aspen, brilliantized by the afternoon October sun, cloak the rising peak, suggesting in their subtle hues a palate so infinite as to conceal from us the meaning of their higher wisdom. Oh, to be up there in those trees on this day, for amongst them must be a hint, even more than a hint perhaps, of this higher wisdom. The treeish communication between these families of deciduous trees exchanges a spectrum of expression as yet unknown by us humans—how else could their family heraldries be so different, paint such a canvas of fall delight. Surely in those heights, looking at those leaves from below, one can sense truths unheard of in the valleys and gorges below.
Down below, where people live, wisdom is limited by a host of forces. To rise above this list of limits seems imponderable. Rigid religious ritual conforms the congregation; prejudices of all sorts of hues serves in everyone’s mind to prejudge people, whether the category into which they are put be ethnic or age, sex or social position, celebrity or ordinary—there, you see, the use of the word “ordinary” condemns one to the mundane, for who knows or wants to get to know anyone “ordinary?”
Sunrise over Denver
The pinks of the cloud wisps give way to the approaching mundane grays of rush-hour morning. The light from the last stars dim and vanish. The blue sky now controls as the sun travels west from the Kansas prairie to illuminate the snow-dusted front range of the Rocky Mountains. The sky, the vast beyond, positions this mountain-featured planet of ours somewhere in an endless universal space.
How simple would have been the view of centuries ago that the sun and the stars revolved around us, that we represented the focal point of this universal canvas. By this morning, though, science has informed us of an endless complexity of this sky, out there millions of light years to the end, or not to the end, of the universe. And maybe beyond, yet another universe. Laugh at the thought of that universe’s different rules of physics, different from the truths of this planet—where opposite formulae rule—where good is evil and evil good—where up is down and down is up, and on and on. If so, where then is truth? Is truth, like beauty, in the eyes of the beholder, a selfish value we seek, a light we see in the distance to which we want to travel, but to which we never reach?
The Lust for Logistics
Living life day after day invites an absorption into logistics. The car must commute, and that is a ritual of bondage by traffic, on-ramps and off-ramps, stop and go lights—mostly stop. Shopping for staples and for self-indulgences—coffee for the commute, clothes and commerce designed for the kids, checking accounts to balance—the minuses that must be turned into pluses—but how and when? These daily preoccupations prevail, and to allow them to dominate is so easy a trap in which to fall. Having fallen, to think, perchance to dream, to imagine, is to look up hopelessly from the bottom of a deep well, only a glimmer of light far off at the top remains, perhaps a vestige of hope, but then only resignation and a further ensuing and ongoing lust for the lure of logistics.
The Copse
Given a grouping of Prairie cottonwoods, their various directions of growth will form a cacophony of forms: their trunks will head in every which way. Why do they not each grow straight, or each lean away from the prevailing winds, their life-forms set by natural forces? Are they each so individualistic in their expressions as to resist these natural forces?
In a copse of aspen or a forest of lodgepole pine, or a hillside of ponderosa pine, trunks are straight up toward the sky, seldom deviating from this given pattern of growth. A few ponderosa may eventually fork into two trunks, their life-trunk bifurcating as it doubles its spread of branches.
In a congregation of people, conformity of behavior and of beliefs is expected. Oh some may deviate ever so slightly, but all paths of life must head in the direction determined by that particular society’s forces. One does not easily move from one congregation to another, nor can a tree pick up and relocate its roots.
The Reunion
Whether high school or college, or corporate or caught-in-catastrophe, reunions of the participants are to be attended by those who were, by choice or by fate, so enrolled in the particular cause or event. Reunions are organized by someone so as to have a schedule of events, to collect money to pay for the meeting hall, for the food to entice, for the mailed-out multi-colored invitations, for the photographer to record attendance and for the work of the organizer. The agenda calls for speeches by the important ones on the alumni role while the ordinary ones
listen to the important ones. Oh, to be important and be listened to, but why be important when one need only listen?
The Clouds of Colorado
Clouds above Colorado—east of the Front Range rising above the Great Plains, where this endless flat prairie finally comes to an end, form designs as abstract as those sketched by an artist on a psychedelic binge. Sometimes the clouds form into flying saucers looking down from on high upon these Denver suburbs, reporting the ever-increasing sprawl of houses, highways and Home Depots back through the universe to their distant home base for further analysis by an all-knowing intelligence.
Other days a grayish cloak spreads to the east like a tide encroaching upon a distant seashore, while a trace of blue sky hugs the tops of the Rocky Mountains, waiting for the slow prevailing westerly winds to dispatch the hovering cloak east toward Kansas and allow the rising sun to shine upon these suburbs.
What is that funnel cloud to the north touching down near the airport? A pencil-thin white or gray pointing up or is it pointing down? Soon gone, moving northeast toward Nebraska. The reason people here build basements (storm cellars) digging down into the earth—for their own safety from these speed-of-light-like inds.
On days when clouds turn into abstract wisps, the sun rises like thunder from Kansas and the clouds turn burning red, only for a passing moment, and then they’re cloud color again as the day and the highway traffic down below sound their daily development.
Poor Marquardt
Poor Marquardt is dead.
Poor Marquardt is dead.
But in the overall scheme of things—“things,” the term applied when no one quite knows the proper label to apply—does it mater that poor Marquardt is dead? Probably not. So, then why should I write about Poor Marquardt? Now? When only you may read?
Because he would want you to know how he died—no, not how, but why he died.
Yes, listen for a moment. After all, why cannot you listen for just one precious moment to why a fellow homo sapiens died? Is that too much to ask of you? If so, then punch another channel on your remote, or place another call on your cellular. Still here? Then let’s you and me tune in to what’s left of Poor Marquardt’s vibes floating through the universe, floating, floating, fading, fading into oblivion. Because Poor Marquardt is dead!
Dead at last, they said. The authorities, those in charge, those really running things—there’s that word again: “things.”
Who was Marquardt and why was he labeled as poor? He wasn’t poor. Look at his Living Trust—he was up to date on estate planning, determined to avoid the costs of probate with siphoning attorney’s fees, he was intent on skirting the age-old systems of society. Yes, Marquardt was as up to date as tomorrow’s news. Nevertheless Poor Marquardt is dead.
He was labeled as poor because he was so rich in knowledge that he was poor in allowed life expectancy. It seems that Poor Marquardt was a marked man of knowledge—destined to be eliminated from consideration by the media, the masses, the academics, to be ignored, to be forgotten as quickly as possible. Only death can bring such ignominy.
But are you interested to know why? If you do learn why, might you not be the next to follow Poor Marquardt, in death, in oblivion, in “nothingness?” Oh, then, run, hide, switch channels, switch anything—there’s that “thing” word again, switch jobs, switch locations, switch brands, switch to the infinity of “nothing”—the antithesis of “something.” Because “things” are what are going on. That’s precisely what Poor Marquardt knew.
On his deathbed, in his last words, in his considered thoughts, in his gifted intuition, the following are the concepts he conveyed to me. I must transmit his mind’s conclusions to you and to everyone else, that is, before—before I, too follow Poor Marquardt into the emptiness of death. For then, even if one person—yourself—hears, reads, listens, thinks, contemplates, then I, like Poor Marquardt, will have passed on these truisms, and they will not be lost to the annals of history, to the silence of the deserts, to the complexities of the jungles, to the wastelands of the swamps, to the obliterating forces of the tides, or gone away with the winds.
I knelt there in the dark, in the rain, in the snow, in the cold, in the wind, over Poor Marquardt, his pain becoming my pain, his blood flowing with my blood, his thoughts becoming my own. He whispered to me, I clinging to every word, remembering, and now reciting for you.
Marquardt was not a man of letters, a scholar, an academic, an “authority,” a celebrity. He was not a guest on any talk show that I know of. Nor was Marquardt a revolutionary, a communist, a white supremacist, an anarchist, a fanatic on any kind or stripe. Marquardt was man, and man was the ruler of the planet, the protector, the watchman, the embodiment of all most holy, all most Godly, all most wonderful. Had he the political connections Marquardt might have been a man of letters, a scholar, an academic, an “authority,” a guest on talk shows, whose picture might have even appeared on the cover of “Time.” For he was time itself. Nevertheless, Poor Marquardt is dead. Will his thoughts, now my thoughts, go with him to the grave? Oh, they didn’t bury him, they just allowed him to blow away on the next gale whipping through our town. Out of sight, out of mind, so they say, so they wish…
So, for the record, for posterity, for the historians, for the psychologists, for the sociologists, for the economists, for the five o’clock news anchor woman, here then is Marquardt’s Manifesto, as told to me:
Whoops, I put the mouse on “paste” and clicked but nothing happened. Where is the rest of my story? Oh, I bet it’s my agent—she just got a new computer, and she said something on her last email that she thinks she punched the wrong key; at any rate the rest of story, well, apparently she’s lost it.
No problem. I’ve got backup. You bet, I always backup everything, whether I need to or not. So, I’ll simply retrieve the rest of this story from my backup...oh, there’s that error message again...same message...I don’t know what that error message means. They’re telling me I have to go to their online support chat room and enter my question. Oh, they assure my satisfaction is their 24/7 concern for, after all, I am a valued customer!
Any rate, send me your email address, and as soon as I recover Marquardt’s Manifesto, I‘ll send it along to you, gratis. And I apologize for any inconvenience.
But hold on before you get pissed. For when you do read Marquardt’s Manifesto I’m certain you’ll agree that waiting for it to appear on your screen on your tablet or wherever was well worth your angst, for it contains universal answers to universal questions.
--Your Faithful Scribe, from somewhere out there in the Universe
Mid-Winter at Heritage Eagle Bend Active Adult Golfing and Living Community
You’ve heard stories about homeowner associations ruling over the citizens living in their condominiums or planned developments, but not until you’ve resided in an active adult community and subjected yourself to their behavioral thought control and activities disciplined police committees, elected by and with the consent of the fifty-plus residents have you experienced the real terror of democratically-elected authorities with their dominating dogma and their rigid rules. Here’s one example that’ll drive you to a life of transiency:
At about 2 a.m. I awoke to a loud banging on our front door. I donned my robe and rushed to see the messenger. She was tall, about 6 feet 4 inches, so I judged because she had to duck and then kneel down to look me hard in the eyes. Her uniform was as dark as the night outside, matching her large black sunglasses that hid the color of her eyes, which I feared raged at me in a red devilish glow. Beyond her at the curb I saw a lighted van and inside two of the biggest goons I had encountered since my days roving with the gangs in Southwest Albuquerque. On the side of van, lighted by the movement-triggered lamppost in our front yard, I could read in large letters arching above an artful logo of a smiling golfer: “Heritage Eagle Bend Discipline Authority.”
My intruding nighttime guest, Amazonia, as I will call her although she didn’t announce
her name to me, wore a wide leather belt in which she housed the largest nightstick I have ever seen. From this same belt her chrome handcuffs sparkled in the flicker from my “welcome” light illuminating my entry door. On her shoulder a communication device crackled with a voice sounding distant, yet I knew that was close because it announced it was from “HEB Headquarters.” Another weapon of strange proportions, dark and sinister, was housed in readiness within easy reach by her right arm, its leather strap unbuckled, its chamber, so I assumed, loaded and ready for trigger pulling.
Her voice was contralto, although not musically so, just ominously so. After giving me two seconds to refute my identity, which I didn’t attempt, she announced, “You been seen running on the paved golf cart paths,” asserting that a camera hidden somewhere high up in one of the cottonwood trees had reported my many morning exercise misdeeds to the “authorities.”
I trembled. She went on, her voice mellowing a decibel or two, “Now we’re a compassionate, friendly, loving community here, Mr. a…ah…” I composed myself enough to remember my name and told her in a weak voice. “Ah, yes,” she mumbled, checking off a box on her clipboard form while adding, “You get one warning, and consider this your one warning.” She paused while the magnitude of her statement sunk in, and then held up her index finger, repeating loudly the word “one,” as if to underline it on some sort of a three-copy official form that she would hand in to a “higher authority.” She raised her dark glasses to rest on her forehead and repeated, as if she were a second grade teacher exercising social authority, “We don’t run or walk on our paved golf course paths. They’re for our dear golfers driving their state-of-the-art golf carts!” For her exclamation point, she touched her long finger to my forehead and held it there until I nodded my head in enough of an affirmative that she withdrew her finger, her hand and her arm and rested the lot on her nightstick. To my relief she turned and walked commandingly down my entry walkway past another of my “welcome” signs.