Morning Mouse

Waking-up moves with the sunrise in a narrow band over the face of the Earth. At the equator it measures perhaps a thousand or fifteen-hundred miles across, tapering as it nears the poles. I would say it looks something like an orange peel, except I've never seen an orange peeled the way longitudes would look if they were peeled from the Earth. In any case, this band travels over the continents at the speed of the sunrise and within it, people come up out of their dreams and into life. There must be a favored hour or two during which the multitudes of China and India wake up. I've often wondered if those hours hold more mystery than the others, so much life all at once seeing itself alive again.

At other times I wonder if the word "mystery" has any meaning left.


Weird thoughts like that one started coming up for me a month or so after this blog itself became mysterious. I'd wake up at two-thirty in the morning and find myself sitting on the side of the bed staring at a print of a little Klee fish painting on the east wall. Some nights the moon is dark, others light, but no matter which, the tiny fishes, as I watch them, seem to glow and to tremble, soundlessly. Before, when occasionally I would be up and about for nature's reasons, I would take no notice of the silence. But tonight -- especially tonight -- I see silence as a human thing, an effect of carefully arranged stone and glass. Outside, there's plenty of sound, crickets and owls, the gentle wind, the river's endless play upon the rocks -- plenty of sound -- but it all seems foreign and penned up, something that remains outside.

Strange, how differently I see things since these fits of wakefulness started. Unlike milady, who notices everything, I never noticed much of anything before. I just lived here. This house might as well have been a Bowery tenement with windows opening onto alleys littered with trash. But the first time I brought her here, even before the place was refurbished, as she stood just there, before that window, watching the narrow mountain stream bouncing downhill, she wondered aloud about the thoughts that might have passed through the minds of the Indians who first chanced upon this view. She said she would like to have been one of the few who could say, "we alone have seen this idyllic stream."

Now I see -- at least here in the night -- that the river does possess a certain kind of sacredness. The Blue Ridge darkens its window after eleven-thirty, and the countryside changes from the orderly assemblage of rural fields and barns it is by day into a black mass of crowded foliage. After midnight, like an indolent thought, the river folds into a hushed softness that lures the mind into its stillness. Darkness elevates the river's daylight greyness into a moonlit ribbon of light, truly worth being the first to see.

Listening to these words in their silence, I hear a disparagement of civilization, the same civilization that brought us the wherewithal to purchase this home ... this very window. But I think that when we see our culture as wholly other to some prior and presumably better world, we see it wrongly. Buildings and street lamps don't destroy the world. They only change the way it looks. For some people, a well-made museum stirs as much awareness of beauty as the paintings hanging there, or as the nature that inspired the painter. Museums, broad avenues, and windows to stand behind while watching the night work its magic on the human soul, merely witness the magnificence we create for ourselves when we work at our best.

The river was never beautiful until milady's Indians chanced upon it.

The world is everywhere a mystery.