Everything Is Nature

The room is lit with a bright artificial white glow. The space is wide and long and the powerful light bulbs hide high overhead, their distance is like the sun, far away but felt by everything beneath it. A long stretch of black and white ads run across the back wall of the bowling alley. The smooth wooden floors of the lanes gleam with thick varnish and a weekly dousing of wax. Echoing through the space is the low rumble of heavy bowling balls. They hit the wood of the lanes. They hit the white pins waiting at the end. The temperature is a perfect 69 degrees. Everything about the room is artificial. Without a word, it manifests its aim, the geometric perfection of clean lines. There is no wave, no tilt, just constant even shape. There is nothing natural about it. Not the wood floors, long cut from the old growth forest. Not the paper used to create the ad campaign along the back wall. The bowling balls and white pins are smooth and nearly perfect. Nothing about this chamber is found in nature. There are no rocks so round, no trees so straight. It is a created room, a created game. But this is nature. It is here, on earth. On a flattened piece of land, in a city shrouded in mist and lit by a distant sun, it is “natural,” mutated and rearranged, but “natural.” The sun, a million times removed, is still present here. The nearly flawless shapes and lines, they exist because of the gleaming orb a million miles away. The wood of the floors grew with heat. The metal foundations were forged with tools from the earth and fire. The artificial composition of the pins and bowling balls are a conglomeration of substances transformed through human hands and ideas. And the humans playing the game, walking in mismatched shoes, smiling after rolling a gutter ball. They exist only because of the sun. Light brings them food, it nourishes plants and animals. Light gives them the ability to build and create artificial worlds with bright lights and wide lanes. The room does not smell of dirt and pine. It houses all the strange creations of the world, but the elements of the earth are still present. The life blood, the moving red vein, is here as well. The flowing red vein moves through the people, moving and walking and rolling. It moves through the filament of the lights overhead. What was once a living, breathing tree is the ground at their feet. What were once buried elements in the soil are now bowling balls. Everything has been transformed, but it has come from the one source. The source of it all. The sun. And while they play indoors, while they try over and over to hit straight rows of white pins, the sun shines outside. Far away, perhaps covered by clouds, but it shines. There is nothing unnatural, not in the cleanest white room, not in the grocery store or chemist’s laboratory. This is nature. Every thought, gust of wind, packaged food, water bottle. Each object is affixed with a million invisible tendrils, tied one to the other, eventually finding its way back, winding and curving through machine and heat, finding its way to the brightest star.

Land Of Compost

About a week ago I went for a walk with an old friend and her boyfriend. They held hands as we walked along dirt paths that crisscrossed with cement sidewalks and litter-strewn black asphalt. I was just a few inches away, feeling the heat between their two palms, tasting the salty sweat of their mingling. We walked through El Salvador, the country of my birth, the land they still drink day after day and where I merely sip from the puddles every couple of years. We moved silently under thick leafed trees and through waves of humid wind. We walked in the shadow of our volcano creator and through plumes of black exhaust that whiled like svelte dancers with even thinner wings. Their words came, encapsulated in despair and a gray horizon. There were no jobs, the bellies of the countryside were still hungry. There were too many people for the small country and more were being born every day. The politicians still took their envelopes of cash and the people, the country of laborers and dreamers, extinguished their lights of hope with each sun that set.
And we walked, and they touched and I felt their words and their heat. Something had happened, they said. Something is happening. This little country of Central America, many times smaller than California, lost in the middle of a geological umbilical cord, this little country had become the most violent place on Earth. New-formed gangs dealt in drugs and crime. There was still the aftertaste of civil war, the death squads had been given new names but still moved through the open veins of city streets and political circles. There were murders every day, and not even the children held on to the dreams of pupusas and candy. El Salvador, they said, lacked purpose. On the glass coffee table of the earth, El Salvador was an odd shaped piece that didn’t fit the nearly-completed puzzle. There was no product they could deliver, nothing that they could contribute to a world of computers and trained technicians.

As they spoke of metal and machines and humans in cloaks and a world of parts, I started to smell the decaying forest floor. I saw mushrooms, I could almost taste the blackened rot of soggy leaves. I looked to my friend of flesh, her hips that gently moved as she walked, I looked to the right, past the street of busy cars and to the seven year old boy pushing a wooden cart of horchata. And then I couldn’t see, I didn’t see it with my eyes, but I felt as though the soil itself began to move through me, the energy of the land entered through the soles of my shoes and moved up my ankles and up through my legs and into my stomach, up and up…and they could not see it and I could not see it, but maybe this is what we had, perhaps this is what we were. We were the other, the subtle creation invisible to the modern eye, different than metal and shiny bits and cities of industry. What we had came from the ground, from the back alleys, from the black soil and the fields of bones. What we had was pumped out of the bloody streets of El Salvador and went up, vaporizing into a finer mist.

We, we machines of flesh. We, we readers and eaters and fuckers. We are a biomass. We are an endlessly repeating blob of flesh that feeds energy and information into a greater accumulator. We are, as Gurdjieff said a long time ago, "food for the moon.” We give to the nearly invisible. We give without knowing. We die, kill, are born, play…we do it without knowing that we ourselves are food. Our lives are the heat of the compost pile, a heap of orange rinds and tea bags and worms that make this smelly mess their home. As long as we walk with eyes closed, as long as we walk without a purpose, as long as we fuck to die we can be nothing but a massive compost pile, a burning pile that moves slowly in the great voidness of space.

The hot bloody biomass that is El Salvador serves as a place where dead life forms get broken down and, consequently, this space becomes a fertile breeding ground for new viruses, new language forms that slowly crawl up to the cold northern lands in a subtle invasion of broken English and ancient invocational rhythms. Maybe the planet has a need for a closed, warm environment, where the ancient and new codes can meet and explode into a thousand new mutations, splashing like burning rain over the borders of the industrialized nations. Such a place is bound to be violent, dangerous and unpredictable, especially when the sun shines with unrelenting force and the mutations multiply in multi-colored threads through the wide open sky. Maybe these things are as they should be, and it is only because we are deep in their entrails, in the very thrust of their movement, maybe because we are the movement itself, we slide into thinking that they shouldn’t be as they are. But regardless of what I want or don’t want, El Salvador continues, creation itself continues in its unrelenting and inherently beautiful grind, its multidimensional dance of life and death that will allow for no compromise.