A friend of mine, upon being overwhelmed by its villains, dopes and goons, by the zombie believers, by the sexual predators and blackface posers of our present ruling class and by the doom-heavy news of the minute, takes a flight of sanity to Groucho Marx and for an hour or so delights in his anarchy. He loves his names: Otis P. Driftwood, J. Cheever Loophole, Rufus T. Firefly. He loves W. C. Fields’ bunch too: Larson E. Whipsnade, Elmer Prettywillie. I have my favorites, but I have to go out into nature for my restoration.
Out into nature sounds either too dressed up or too anodyne to mean what I want it to mean. I want sky above me. I want weather. I want birds. I want the possibility of fox and weasel. I want earth that gives beneath my feet. I want a walking out. I want silence, that most dear commodity. I want a disconnect from the hive and instead that which connects me to patterns, shadows, cloud movement, the intricacy of the seen world, of the physical world of trees, trails, rocks, moving water, wind in branches, wind on my face. I want the stillness, just watching, maybe waiting for appearances of hawks and crows, for deer in a staredown, for the upright always puzzled look of groundhogs.
We will need each other more than anything else to help us through what’s coming, but restorations always require a legion of sources for solace and strength, so bring on Firefly and Whipsnade and please Prettywillie and the cry of owls and the rough wind too.
