[MD] Reevers of Knowing

[MarshaV]

What is perspective?  Where should one get their proper dose of perspective?




There is a spider tattooed on the back of her throat so the words won't
choke her.  Words sometimes bunch up and take her breath away.  It's that
spider's dance to spin those the words into a silver thread to keep them
moving, to create her story,,, her dance, her laughter, her tears, her
moonshadow.  








-----Original Message-----
From: moq_discuss-bounces at lists.moqtalk.org
[mailto:moq_discuss-bounces at lists.moqtalk.org] On Behalf Of John Carl
Sent: Saturday, August 08, 2009 6:20 PM
To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
Subject: [MD] Reevers of Knowing

I hate people who hate bugs.


I can't help it.  When I see one, I shudder with revulsion and if they come
near me I shriek with fear and go stand on a chair.  I know they have their
place in Nature's scheme, but its a visceral reaction on my part over which
I have no control.


I don't necessarily want them poisoned or stepped on, I just need somebody
to deal with  them for me.  Brush 'em out of my house and out of my life so
I don't have to look at them or deal with them at all.


Last weekend, my father-in-law's wife, Chris,  married for  a few years now
after his first, my wife's mom, died of cancer.  Chris saw a beetle in my
kitchen and she gasped.  I jerker around expecting to find the refrigerator
on fire, but no, it was a beetle.


"You don't like bugs?"  I asked.


"No!" she exclaimed, "I'm allergic."


"Well", I replied, "the best thing to do is let them crawl all over you
then.  Allergies are caused by underexposure.  Allergies are an
inappropriate immune system over-reaction due to too little experience with
the 'foreigner'."


She gave me a strange look and soon got out of my house.   I didn't even
need help brushing her away  or have to stand on a chair and shriek.


She's a sweet enough person, I suppose.  But she is from Southern
California, which is bad enough, but even worse she used to work in
Hollywood as a sound editor (even got an emmy once for her work on Lonesome
Dove) and she name-drops all the time in the most annoying fashion.  I could
put up with celebrity worship, I guess.  For a short time.  But bug-hating
puts her  beyond the pale.


There was one incident in my house where I didn't mind the person's fear of
bugs; when we hosted the "Chernobyl Children".  Olia didn't like bugs.  I
cut her some slack because A:  she was cute and B:  If you live most of the
year in radiation which is invisible and killing you, you're allowed some
displacement quirks.  She hated the term "Chernobyl Children" btw.  She said
it sounded like they were all afflicted with, as she termed it with a
spastic expression, "Syndrome Downs".  She always wanted Americans to be
aware that there were no infirmities or inferiorities about her person or
intellect in any way.  And she never met an American who disagreed.



 When she went into sobbing hysterics on the night she was supposed to go
back to Belarus,  Lu asked her what was wrong and she went into a quite a
long crying jag in Russian that nobody could understand, but seemed to
satisfy her need to explain herself.  At the end of her tirade, lifting her
tear-streaked face to Lu and I hovering worriedly over her, she could only
inform us of the reason for her fear of spiders was,  "They have reevers of
knowing".


Now did she mean "Rivers" or "Reavers"?  At the time, it sounded like
"reavers", but I'm pretty sure she meant "rivers".  She didn't know the
english word "reaver" but she absolutely knew the word "river".  What
tingles my memories still, is spiders as "reevers of knowing" in the
beautious ambiguity which means so much more than either of its
alternatives.


Because I think they truly might be.  Whatever she meant, to this day I like
to think of spiders as both "reavers of knowing"  and "rivers of knowing"
They are so sensitive to vibration  with their slender webs quivering in the
ether and living by what comes.


I told my son, who is eight, that spiders catch bad dreams in their webs,
and the scarier-looking the spider, the better they are at catching
nightmares.  Sometimes the fearsome job demands the fearsome aspect.  Now
that's an interesting truth in that it is based on fancy, but by its
utterance becomes reality.  My son is not afraid of either spiders or dreams
as a consequence of a fancy.



Now, of course you'd have to be plumb out of almost a thousand better
alternatives in the social  realm to be glad of a spider's company, but
that's pretty much where I was at in the summer of '84, really out, really
done with that girl who hated me for all I was best at, my first wife, D.
and all on my own, living like a turtle with the world on its back.


Kids, let it be a warning to you.  Don't get married at 19 to your very
first and only girlfriend experience.  All I ever wanted was  to make a
family in the world I'd been born into.  And here I was, seven years later,
living out of the back of my VW Pickup Campershell and wondering if I'd ever
find another woman to love me, wondering where I was headed and what I was
gonna do.


I started by going on a canoe trip down the Feather River with my best
friend Griego.   After I got back from that trip, I went by myself on a
river, the American, way above Sacramento, for a week and a half in a green
idylic Eden that only lacked an Eve or I might be there still.


I wasn't in a home anymore so I guess I was ... camping?  It sounded better
than homeless.


Anyway, I wasn't homeless.  I had my vehicle.  In America, I think what we
mean by "homeless" is actually "vehicleless" because as long as you can get
from place to place, you can sleep in your car, or friend's couches.  But
once you lose that magic carpet, you're on the street, a shamblin' bum.


The place I encountered my spider friend was also on the American, but much
lower down.  We'd let in at Salmon Falls bridge and canoed down the upper
reaches of the reservoir to a nice camp site.  Me.  My friend Griego, his
girl Monique and his two kids from his wife Jan.


I was really counting on Griego at this moment in my history.  When he'd
been castaway for his playboy proclivities by Jan, D and I, still a stable
married couple, had been open, generous and sharing to the lonely bachelor.
Now here I was, on my own and needing some payback support and "shoulder to
cry on" type affirmation like I'd given in my turn.  So I was expectant...
which always leads to trouble.


And then there was the Monique issue.  I quite fancied her.  She was exactly
opposite my ex's physique and attitude and that was a draw, but she
attracted men anyway in that sylph - like way some women have.  Dark hair,
brown eyes, pretty, petite, quiet.  A good listener in her peaking-out-from
her hair way with laughter at the right moments.  For me, that's always the
killer.


But in this situation, her main adversary is Griego's wife, and any concern
out of friendship for me and my situation pales in consideration.


While Griego must balance playing with his girlfriend and his best friend,
he's also brought his kids.


So what this all adds up to, my unhappy camper, is the bluest, loneliest and
saddest feeling yours truly can remember in his almost 50 years of before
and since.  All these people with their competing social connections, and
me, severed of all.   Worse than that first time at pathfinder camp spent
stumbling through strange rows of white tents and wondering whether I would
ever find my group... and that time there were silent tears streaming down
my face, this time it was just an empty ache in my heart wondering if I'd
ever find somebody to love.


And prayer.  I prayed like hell.  I prayed so hard that if my prayers had
been answered and a ski boat of bikini-clad coeds had broken down on our
beach, I'd probably have to be some sort of televangelistica today.  Thank
god that didn't happen though.  Instead I found a spider on my shoulder.


Small, hairy little spider, of a certain jumping, rather than web-waiting
variety.  We became friends and it amazed me how faithfully that little
spider would return to its perch on my shoulder, sharing with it's compound
eyes, my perspective on the world and if knocked off in some rambunctious
game of frisbee with Griego's kids, would return, scrambling a tenuous web
that bound us together for a brief time.


Tom Hanks?  In Cast Away?  Making a friend of a volleyball?  I totally got
that scene.  That is human truth in cinematic form, right there.  We will
socialize, even if we have to go to great lengths to find our other.


The thing is, it worked.  I sort of understood.  If you have enough love for
a spider, then believe me, more will come.  A sort of ease passed through my
mind where I was able to wait a bit.  Be more patient.  Get some
perspective.


Get some perspective!!!


That right there might be the most succinct, philosophical help I can give
anybody in three words or less.  You really don't need much.  Climb a
mountain and look down on your route.  Identify yourself with a piece of
cosmos bigger than your own ego.  For me, the spider friend gave me enough
perspective to realize my position in this camping trip was just not
appropriate, not working and not fun.  I bailed.  Next morning, I asked
Griego to paddle me back to my car.  It was time to start sniffing around
Sierra College and what lay in store for me there next.  I was out of here
as a prop in other's people's romantic drama.


As we near the bridge tho, I noticed a fluttering in the water, and found a
baby bird, just under the age where it could fly.  Needing attention.  So I
stayed the week, catching grasshoppers and feeding them into that tiny,
endless maw of hunger that baby birds possess.  The new center of attention
from the kids, the girl and my own egoistic need to be needed.  I was
healed.  I was grateful.


I still am.  I pass under a bridge and I think as a surrogate momma bird,
that some of my distant relatives might be darting for bugs.  I see a spider
and I don't think "ewww".   I realize some people do and I don't argue with
them.  I even agree that there is some "ewww" in their relationship with the
spiders of the world.  I just don't agree that the source of the ewwww is in
the spider.  The source is in the intellect of the ewwww'er.
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