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| Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, as framed by Earthbender Iris Jenks Henry, immediately before the battery in the camera died |
One of the things I've been doing is
writing sixteen-sentence prose pieces. I call them essays, or
something. My favorite thing about modern essay, other than the
blog, is the way it combines various ideas into one, read Brian Doyle
and Patrick Madden and the Festival of Faith and Writing (the best
conference in the greater US of A), and the way it can jump from one
idea to another, the way it does with this sentence, and this short
story at Haystack, and the way I keep thinking that I can
self-publish, like a self-titled EP, Melissa Jenks, the Short
Stories, but I'm too chicken, and then I think about the article I
read in fu**ing Oprah about vulnerability. Of all places.
It reminded me of a lot of the things
that I've been reading about brain chemistry and human evolution (pop
quiz: what happened 100 million, 1 million, 100,000 years ago?) and
how scientists (of the hard and not the Christian variety) believe
that homo sapiens evolved its complex brain architecture in response
to compassion. And that dogs evolved their domestication with us at
about 40,000 years ago; and that many of the things about the ways
that our neurons map up against our evolutionary architecture has a
connection to morphogenic fields; and Darwin wrote about red fields
of algae bleeding from South America in Voyage of the Beagle (nota
bene: he was a 25-year-old biologist aboard a clipper rounding Cape
Horn by sail, in the noble day of sail, when Captain Josh Slocum was
out there in his Spray, and all of us and our bilious climate change
were just a gleam in their eye, praise Jesus); and now I carry my
Shadow behind me and he pees on my floor when he is anxious and I am
alone as my life partner sails across the Atlantic and I realize how
Ahab's wife must have felt, not to mention all the wives and
sweethearts that were never to meet. I'm here with my dog, my
Shadow, and my shadow, my terror at the silence of the strawberry
moon. And also the television, the only thing aside from meditation
and dreaming that offers alpha waves for the evolved brain.
And the internet, I suppose. I propose
this as a cautionary tale. I am home, like Emily Dickinson who
wouldn't leave hers, but I have MBPN and factory-farmed pork and myth
and the USPS and the future falling backwards behind me as I look up
at the stars and thunder in the sky. Yeah, I'm home.
Whatever that means. With my Southeast
Asia on a Shoestring and Joy of Cooking laid out in front of me.
It's weird, being here, the end of June, one month of spring already
gone, half the garden not planted, because of us, our pursuit of
adventure or art or whatever it is. Rolling thunder rumbles.
(Answer, inverted, if I could figure
out the html: dinosaurs explode because of asteroid, neanderthals
evolve tools, and homo sapiens emigrate Africa.)
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