Children of an Unseen Age

 I suppose usually, we would wait until the kite dives into the grass hummocks of the field. In that case, the string goes slack, and retrieving the kite becomes a matter of spooling the inert cord back onto the plastic handle.             This time, my three year old son wanted to hold the handle. The kite string, a thread of nylon as thin as embroidery floss, was improbably canted into the sky, tugged by a sail shaped like a dragon and being tossed by the heavier winds that start about eighty feet aloft. It is one thing to release a helium balloon into the sky (though you shouldn’t). The experience of watching an object fall  upward  is exhilarating, disorienting, resetting of expectations, even vertigo-inducing…such is our imprisonment in gravity, that mysterious force that seeks always to move us closer together, crush us all into  One.  And, indeed, helium, given the chance, will eventually escape Earth altogether, and fly off ...

It’s called scrying. You take a handful of ochre dust or ash, or bits of old bone, or leaves in the bottom of a teacup. You throw the bones in the air, or cast the dust on the ground, you drain the cup and thump it down on the board and claim your destiny. You draw cards: feeling which ones stick slightly to your fingers, or call you to choose them. Always, there’s an invitation to an influx of chance — how else will you learn what you don’t already know? (Or, don’t know that you know?) We let the hand of mystery rearrange the patterns we enlarge. Always, it takes us beyond our capacities to describe, to leave an exact trail of breadcrumbs — that’s because of the incredible interwoven simultaneity of everything, and also because certain symbols, certain metaphors, are strengthened and empowered as the two objects of comparison migrate further from each other in terms of what they literally are, away from any chance meeting of each other in the same quotidian plane. And then, of cour...

  Who are you? No. Who are you, really? Do you have a certain answer, or is it a foggy cloud with wispy tendrils reaching far from the center of your normal? Is your answer held in the chalice of your ambitions, or does it rise from dark waters like a shark taking out a seal? Is who you are sending out roots that subtly connect you to the core identity of everything else? We are, as a people, mostly afraid to act. Henry David Thoreau famously declared: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Yet, “Most people lead lives of paralyzed ambivalence,” would be nearer the mark. We are afraid to act, both in the intensified glow of the stage-lights, but also  simply at all.  We try to be normal. Our range of expressive behavior generally stays within a narrow band of acceptable characteristics — an unwritten schedule of how to behave (for whoever we think we’re supposed to be). Alcohol loosens the confines a little or disastrously; so also, apparently, does chopping our head...