The Reckoning of Jean-Pierre, Chapter 4
A Walk In The Forest
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5
I can finally feel the echos of my history swelling and building deep within my bosom again. A new sense of this life. Just the night before, in the city, I had felt so lost and without hope, alone, no longer recognizing those around me; staggering through this decrepit time. But when I awoke in this cabin, I felt at home again, at peace. It must have been in a sleepwalking state last night that I wrote my heart out at this very desk. Such a fine desk at that – its top a beautiful dark mahogany slab that has clearly stood the test of time better than I. A candle melted artfully over its corner as I wrote and wrote and wrote. It seems last night I had been industrious in other ways as well, as I had clearly gathered some wet, soft pine to erect myself a makeshift bed. I do not have even a single memory of falling asleep upon my wet rags in the audience of such a glorious fire. But that is how I had awoken at some point during the night. I remember this one detail oh so well. The smell of a life’s memories mixed effortlessly with the cozy, warm whiff of burning pine. This fire in my heart burned and blazed so brightly during that dark evening.
By morning I lie dry and awake with a little warmth still burning inside my belly. I sat at the edge of my makeshift bed. It took me a moment to remember where I had come from. I still could not remember how I got inside this cabin. Too tired, weary and gray to be bothered with such bagatelles. I walked barefoot on the cold stone and dirt floor towards the wood stove which was feeling neglected. I began amassing kindling and building a small fire on which to heat a pot of cold water. Striking a fresh match, I toss it into the stove, although I am not entirely sure this is even needed, as some warm, soft orange embers still glimmer and glow in its combustion chamber from the night before. Closing the door to the stove, I wait patiently to warm myself by the fire as the tepid steam dances smoothly out of the top of the kettle. As I warm myself on its cloud of misty fumes, I am finally reminded of where I had come from just the night before.
“Ah yes!” I said out loud. “That urban citadel.” The thought that made me recall that place was this: I am warming myself out here in this forest by this warm kettle. It conjures in my mind a vision of a society occasionally warming itself from its own melting pot. Yet it soon comes to a quick boil, releasing some of the fiery hot pressure it is feeling inside. Then it erupts and let's forth a burst of burning steam! I can hear the kettle whistling even now in my ears… Why must they let it keep festering, screaming and boiling over? Haven’t they learned to listen to the warning signs?
Once I was dressed I went out for a morning jaunt to explore these forests outside this cabin. I remember them in fleeting moments from my youth. Yes, immersing myself in nature will give me some inspiration to write about my dear life some more. Dear reader, are you enjoying this story? I know that at times it rambles and feels disjointed but this is my nature. This is the result of my one modern life full of constant digital distractions and lost fragments of hidden dreams.
As I step out onto the stone steps, I already feel a sense of reinvigoration. I breathe in the calm, clear, beautiful late winter morning air. I’m beginning to see the small glistening of Spring to come. The smell of new green conifers growing, with their pungent, almost cinnamon aromas; a smell, a color, and a feeling that has filled nature with such bright contentment. The copses of dew covered firs are all around me, surrounded by springtime wildflowers. The last bout of snow has waned, and now the spring melt is alive again! The smell of spruce and sunny yellow, blue and green sprouting pride! The chickadees are humming a delightful tune. I tuned the instruments of my soul to their chords of merriment so I could enjoy them even closer. I can feel the sounds swelling deep in my chest. It is the gentlest and softest song I had heard in many years. It became apparent to me that I had grown accustomed to the harsh audibles of the city. The digital sirens mixed with the dark smokey grey snow covered in gritty unnatural looking metallic dirt. Grey snow! Blech. What a contrast to this lily white landscape which stands before me. But there was so much more to it if you looked hard enough. I could see amongst the clear palette the bright green offshoots of life emerging from the dead winter trees. I could see and hear the dark magpie nests teeming with life. Chicks chirping abound for their Dear Mother. Chirp! Chirp! Chirp! Mother, where are you? We have grown hungry again! The landscape grows forth; the birds send out from their nooks and nests like tiny parasails into the wind. As I walk further and further from the hut where I had slept just the night before, I begin to forget how I even got here? Where am I? Has this natural age I stare at with such wonder already passed into the history books? Is this all a dream of my imagination? Can men still see all the wondrous joy that a life free of technological industry can bring? Even in my old age where I have lost much of the memories of my youth there's still so much more goodness and truth I can see out here at present. It is no wonder I felt so desolate and alone like all the others in the urban sprawl of humanity. Here are the blessings of natures delights! We can enjoy them together you and I as long as we still breathe and live and dream.
In a clearing by some old peach trees which have long since withered their fruits the season before, I see a family of deer, two fresh born twin fawns frolicking in the warm delight of a possible rebirth of this Earth and its new swan season. I see them with their long pointed snouts picking at what new glimmers of life are emerging near the base of an old oak tree. An oak tree which has sheltered these and other animals for what seems like an infinitesimal amount of time. I delight in watching them carefully seek out the most delicious leaves with their pointy soft noses, pink tongues occasionally emerging to lick up the spoils. In the distance on the top of the ravine looking down into this canyon I can see an enormous ram looking down on his progeny. No more than five years old according to those horns with two turns to them. I watch him as he scans and looks on his potential harem peering down from the heights of the enormous cliffs that line this valley. I could see the pageantry that the animals speak and dance as a part of. Oh do they dance before me! About to and fro! That is at least until they realize of my existence watching them and then they blush and grow bashful in their movements. Most of us no longer witness these spiritual achievements of nature. Last I had heard my fellow man spends half of his existence staring at a plastic screen upon which is transmitted an imaginary picture of what life is supposed to be like. The television screen and the Entertainment Media Complex started all this unreal madness. Replacing an analog glass window presenting man with a true outside reality, filled with birds and wild nature, with an unreal boob tube box hiding in his fake heart. Written word and spoken word is another thing completely. You have to use your imagination at least to re-visualize the dreams of a poet in your own likeness. To imagine that I can find that same glory and more just staring through my own eye sockets at nature alone and nothing else. It sways and it dances before me. It almost makes me weep thinking of these childlike creatures, who bear no resemblance any longer to that of an adult human being, that are hooked on human invented screens filled with fake holographs. A young and still wet kid-ling born to a yearling fawn is more of an adult than those I see carrying on in those cities. Can't you see the divine spirit carried out here within nature? A divine spirit that you wreak havoc upon with each waking day and each breath, as you my friends, even your harshest of critics, you in your cities rely on the destruction of nature so that you can consume your goods unquestioningly each day. Consume, consume and do not ask any questions indeed.
I had seen for myself and heard the stories of the greatest generation destroy itself in a pointless technicians battle. A World War that wrecked the already dwindling spirit of man. I had seen their own children also come to destroy themselves in the resulting hippie revolution. How else would you respond to such a ghastly disaster in the first place? By seeking never ending pleasures, peace and love and coming up empty. Or was it all just a Government plot too? Some sort of ultimate mind control. Now came the final coup de grace, the fait accompli of ultra man. Oh the information technology age. What happens to a man who is promised the whole rational digital world in trade for his analog spiritual soul? This latest generation was about to find out. Would they ever really know what initial technological gyrations had set forth during those great World Wars? Motions which had already damned to ruination the spirit of mans soul.
Depression, suicide, an empty modern longing-ness that we can all feel swelling within one another, a chasm in the heart, a void to be filled with Doctor's prescription drugs, alcohol and black market procurements. So many great authors knew of the coming spiritual Failures of Technology. Friederich Junger comes to mind. Knut Hamsun too. Our own dear Henry David Thoreau but of course. The intelligent contrarians often of which we wish to be forgotten. Herman Hesse felt this as well when he wrote about the coming Spirit of Europe, the signs of the times. “Everywhere”, he said, “we could observe the reign of the herd instinct, nowhere freedom and real love. A community born of fear and dread, inwardly rotten, outworn and close to collapsing.” Why exactly did man stop heeding the words of such visionaries of the past? My Dear Friends, my lost compatriots in your cities, what are you preoccupied with today? Does the media agree? Yes, they all agree. You are supposed to be distracted from the truth and afraid of one another. Here in the forests we can feel valiant once again. We welcome and invite in our forest neighbors with open arms, embracing them for being different from the untrusting world out there and loving them for being just like us here inside these hidden valleys.
In order to go deeper in these forest journeys I must slowly grow my strength again by continuing on each time further than the last. Here in this holy natural place I must eventually forget these negative thoughts that I used to carry with me. I need to lighten my burdens. I am breathing slightly at peace and ease once again. Around noon it looks like a storm will break. I'm meandering past the grand Swift River, past the lone oak hill and I crawl my way back to the wooden peat moss hut like a tired and weakened animal. Back inside the cabin my mind wanders when I am in front of my papers with my pen in hand once again.
One day God noticed me. And He noticed I was doing bad things with my life. I noticed that too and so I started doing better things with my life. I hope He notices that too.
When I was a small boy they always said I was so smart and clever but I never actually knew what they meant or thought it was true myself. I felt so young and naive. It was their own wishful thinking they wanted to impress on me. The hopes that I would be smart enough to take care of my own affairs someday if only I tried harder. Everyones affairs! Keep on trying harder my boy. The world needs new bodies and bureaucrats to man the technical battle stations! It was all a ruse. I just had thick glasses. This fooled everyone into suspecting I was overly clever especially in school. We all wore glasses in those days. It was just the leftovers of a family tradition really. The intelligent underachievers. Truthfully, I was always in the bottom rungs of my classes. Studying was hard and school simply bored me. Life bored me. The country bored me. The city drew me nearer with its excesses but I knew nothing of the use of it all. Was there really any use? Human society all seemed so useless and contradictory and falling upon such bad whims and morals. Mans irrational pride and lust for more and more, standing completely at odds with the wisdom of the past. Big Hollywood and the Big Screen, the song and dance of Material Wealth, replacing the esteemed visions of our ancestors. The rants of a modern get rich quick mad-man replacing the sonnets of the great poets of the past. Whole religious movements simply preaching the word of prosperity. Uber speedy red Teslas plugged into every outlet, green plastic Gunga-din boots made overseas and a Manhattan McMansion with a triple car garage to put it all in. That is the illusion of urbanity. That you will get some slice of the excesses as reparations. I was like that young man in Paul's Case searching for my next scrap of money so I could elevate myself and my character for just a brief moment amongst the twilight of the city scapes and falling Broadway lights. It was a sad case Paul's Case and it had in it Paul, not as some pious apostle, but as a young lost boy that you both hated and admired and in the end you wouldn't be surprised if you met the same fate on the metro-line tracks. That your resentful life would end up split out on the third rail. I felt a kinship with this sick Paul lad, especially as a young man. We were almost one and the same in my mind, he just had better flowers in his lapel.
Where does this leave a child in today's world? Inferiority, low self esteem, these are the things that chase a young person who is put in a weakened position outside of their will. These are the enemy positions you try to battle and fortify your own defenses against as an adolescent. How can you create your own power process in today's evil and twisted world? That is what every man is after if he really thinks about it. Self fulfillment and ideation, things to do each day which empower yourself personally and fit into a bigger picture of you and your collective part of the history of mankind. Humans have almost become particularly useless and pathetic in modern times. We lack basic survival and family skills that humans used to always carry with them. There is very little we actually need or can do to empower ourselves personally these days. Why and what for? Modernity makes it all seem so utterly pointless of an endeavor. Just take a short-cut and push an easy button is the moderns way. Plus when you're young you don't even know if you’ll live long. In fact you suspect that you won’t. Not at the rate I used to travel in those urban circles. You don’t really care either way. You have not lived through much of anything yet. You suffer from a lack of real experience. You just have short-term prospects in front of your eyes. It is not until you age a bit more, til your thirties and forties at least. Just a little bit more so that you start thinking about more long-term goals. Even then they're just five to ten years out. You generally assume you will be dead either by the age forty-five or fifty-five. Sixty-five seems an impossibility when you are young. You don't think of seventy-five or eighty-five or even ninety-five at all. Statistics say that seventy-five is your limit. You realize this when it is almost too late that it hits you in the face upon retirement next year. You spiral your way towards death without any sort of legacy in your mind or in your remembrance. This is the way life has always been but today there’s a new rub, a new central ruse. In todays ever changing technological world that spinning around and around is moving faster and faster than ever before. How exactly did we become so restless?
