Nonfiction

I wrote my first nonfiction piece and had fun doing it. It's dry.

I and Squirrel

1. I know about people who walk in aimless longing and look for something outside their subjectivity. The ones that produced creepy paintings of factory workers melding into machines or the pretty, disaffected German poets that descended into the Black Forest to find natural law. If they lived here, they’d tip up a squirrel’s chin and stare hard into its polished black eyes. And like of their any supple, powdered dames, no squirrel gal can resist Lord Byron, not during mating season.

Without Schwarzwald, they would concentrate on what little Nature escapes the tacky tastes of people who disappear at eight and come home at five: green tufts on power lines, round bushes, and pointy, mean trees that loom over all the landscaping. I happen to be an old hand at glorifying suburbia and sing this diorama of weird old ladies and brick buildings electric no less expertly than in my old town. I raise my coat collar, hands tight in my pockets, and walk aimlessly with the best of them.

The difference is that I am a humanist, by which I mean that though trespassing private property to distraction, I could never fall in love with a squirrel. Unlike a tiger who looks like death, sex, and danger (and correspondingly, Lord Byron), a squirrel is like a drop of crap with a ball of lint behind it though some misguided poet once complemented its “beautiful ass.” While suffering a shortage of tigers, this place happens to be flush with gray and black bodies, a human interest touch that the Set Designer (who probably dons a green sweatshirt in the sky) could have omitted.

Okay, I admit that I too stare at one cloudy-tailed specimen sometimes because Romantic desperation told me to. Rigid with its paws up in bonsai position, it stops chewing and boldly directs at least one eye my way, no mean feat because both seem stapled to opposite sides of its head. Every mental muscle is effortlessly taut as it waits to decide whether it can stay or run in the opposite direction. I also look like I have some potential energy, the kind I usually express by chasing pigeons.

As for its look, one could learn as much staring at a suit button in the Garment District. Its eye is convex and intense in the same way shoe polish can be intense. A frustrating natural mystery because the deeper you penetrate past the round surface, the faster the ray of your look ricochets back to you. Even if you squint like Dirty Harry and ask, “What do you know that I don’t?” the squirrel will give you no saucier “Shenaynay says no” than its body language can muster. Unlike a Morpho butterfly that landed on my shoulder and gained admission to the family crest, the squirrel didn’t choose me and has no fealty, but is looking out of less than mere impudence. With a man’s disturbing repulsion at his stringy, red newborn, I can only like a squirrel when it pelts me with chestnuts from the trees. At least it shows human traits, something you can latch onto, like the baby when it sneezes. Besides, everyone knows that you can only have an I-Thou experience with something colorful. Next time I’ll seek out a Nicaraguan mut-mut and be sure to invite Novalis.

St. Mathieu-du-Parc

2. What did they put in my lentil sauce or cucumber yoghurt that brings me here to a bench near the wide pond in its most glinty afternoon hour, staring into the eyes of a frog? Guruji said that we should observe nature with the awe and wonderment of a child, but other than the huge amount of water I drank during these six tormenting, amusing days of silence, I’ve not been slipped any Kool Aid as far as I know. Tracing the path of Christmas lights to the meditation tent, I’ve had every sitcom theme song stuck in my head and after a bout of desperation, rebelliously matched Erlend Oye’s “Sheltered Life” to the poor accompaniment of bongo drums. And damn it all, I began to zone out on patches of sky by the end of the fourth day.

All this time I felt guilty and stupid for heaping guilty and stupid thoughts on my imposed mental silence. Or jealous of the older ladies in Punjabi dresses dancing like idiots at the satsang and spouting “I belong to you.” The Canadian boys my age ride around on tractors filled with daikon radishes as if they bought the ashram’s “this is your home” schtick. The people that work in the garden with me skipped two levels of Enlightenment crushing potato bugs. Jai Guru fucking Dev.

What happened to unite my fellow Advanced Coursers in a silent ring of experience? What did I miss? Was it something like following a woman in our garden group who showed us edible leaves? Or the fun I had silently teaching a girl to canoe? Against all odds, here I sit like someone blathering drunk and aware of it, alternating pond staring shifts with dusky ladies who are recovering from actual ailments. Finally I’m in earnest and don’t shake my fist at spittle bugs, demanding that they wow me like they do the rest of the ashram illuminati. I too am holding a frog’s watery brown eye, close to tears.

Clearly this tentative ring, no, square of light has to end. All epiphanies do. Soon it will be replaced by other moments of connection, less tenuous because they involve humans. I will even get to witness the guru’s pyrotechnics as he lectures in the tent during a thunderstorm. Though the mark is not indelible, at least I won’t leave like my aunt, wanting pizza.