Sea of Grass

I'm not sure we will ever get over the ocean.

It's the limit, I believe, of our imagination as human beings.  Sure, we understand that our planet is bigger than the ocean, or that the sun is bigger than our planet, or that the vastness of the cosmos contains orders of magnitude beyond measure.  But we can't ever grasp those sizes the way we can grasp the ocean.

I've been thinking about the ocean here, in the prairie.  I'm ranchsitting for some friends right now, taking care of their herds of bison, longhorn, and llamas.  Zipping across their fields, with miles of grasses waving in the Texas breeze, there is no other metaphoric vocabulary with which to describe something so big and open.

It's almost beyond cliche to talk about the prairie as a sea of grass.  Covered wagons were called schooners, after all.  I always think of Gregory Peck's character in The Big Country, a retired Navy captain who came west because the land reminded him of sailing.

I've heard outer space described in these terms ("The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean" was an episode of Sagan's Cosmos).  And God, too, I have often heard is an infinite ocean of light and love.

So, as I said, I don't think we'll get over it.  It's oceans all the way down for us.  Anything bigger than an ocean is an ocean, too.  It's the biggest big our ape brains can handle.

This is a strong example of the disconnect between thought and language, though an aspect of that problem we don't often consider.  Lots of us writerly types get all flustered over the fact that we have thoughts which have no appropriate words, but with anything bigger than the sea, the opposite is true.

We have a word for universe, but we can only think ocean.

The Heart Reader

I met a guy the other day, about my age, went to school with my girlfriend.  He said he had just quit his job not too long ago working for a company that read cardiographs.

People all across the nation go through tests for abnormalities of the heart, and that raw data, all their hours and hours of heartbeats, get sent to this nondescript office building here in Texas.  There, people like this guy spend all day looking at computer screens, reading what information there is to be found in those peaks and valleys.

And this guy, he said he hated being a cardiograph technician.  He said he couldn't stand going to the boring, stuffy office building, sitting in a depressing little cubicle under the harsh florescent lights, staring at a screen for eight hours.  He said that kind of work is not for him.

Now, he works at an organic grocery store in Dallas, making smoothies and sacking kale for yuppies.  He says he is happier.

But if we consider the heart to be the source of all things, the seat of our truest self, I think there is a strange poetry to his former job.  He read, and people in that building continue to read, heartbeats.  As if they were laying their heads on the chest of a stranger a thousand miles away.  Surely the heart is too intimate and powerfully personal to be turned into pure data, just lines on a screen.

But no, it did not hold him.  The divide of the depersonifying computer screen was a gulf too great to be crossed.  He never came to know the people whose hearts he read, except in a superficial medical sense.  He learned, for example, if they suffered from arrhythmia.

But reading a heartbeat does not mean you know someone's heart.  And if the pulsing, unfiltered language of our innermost self is no longer powerful enough to inspire wonder and understanding, how can the black lines of the words I type claim to be worth more?

Chartreuse: semiotics

My Christmas tree is chartreuse.  It says so on its white cardboard box.

I was eighteen years old when I got this tree, and I didn't know what color chartreuse was.  I thought it was some kind of magenta or maroon.  Now I know better, but only because of this tree.

Just like that, a word gains meaning.  I had seen chartreuse things before, surely, but I did not recognize them as such.

It is a miracle, the miracle of language, writ small by my Christmas tree.  The meaning exists without the word, but it is not quite understood.

Dead Reckoning

Blogging is a stupid word.  Vlogging is even worse, but I haven't ever done it.

Now, log is an okay word on its own.  It has a great physicality to it, it it comes out of times when people worked aboard ships.

You use a device called a log (which, a long time ago, actually was a log, like, a part of a tree) to measure how fast your ship is going.  You take those measurements regularly and keep them in a logbook.  It's important to keep track of your speed like this, because it lets you know how far you've traveled in an age before GPS.  For centuries, an accurate logbook was the only way to determine your position on the open ocean.

Over time, "logbook" became "log," and it began to include lots of other information as well.  Then "web logging" was invented, and it needed a special name instead of just "writing a diary for internet strangers to read."  So blogging entered the lexicon, even though it sounds more like something they would do to heretics during the Inquisition, or a step in the process of cheese production.

The thing is, though, a log used to be important.  In 1707, Admiral Cloudesley Shovell and around 2,000 other members of the British Navy drowned in the English Channel, because they didn't know where the hell they were.  Their logbook was off, and they couldn't figure out the position of their fleet.  They struck rocks near the Isles of Scilly.  Four ships sank.  Bodies washed up to shore for days.

This log doesn't carry the same weight.  My world is not without a landmark or two.  But nonetheless, maybe writing here can help me get my bearings.  Someday, although I'm not sure how, I would like to be able to navigate from this log.  To read my longitude in the line of words.

I'm not sure where I'm heading or how fast.  And I don't know how to change course.  But maybe if I can locate myself on the map I'm drawing here, I can at least be prepared when I get there.  I have this log, and I have the stars at night: people have crossed oceans with as much.

And you, internet strangers, if you are skilled in trigonometry, maybe you can find my position, too.  Trace it out on a map, and divine our distance by walking a compass across the table.  If you can chart my course, try to meet me somewhere in the open sea.

If you see me, throw me a line.