The Blogger: A Short Tale

[mqbush]

The Blogger: A Short Tale

Another gray day.  It’s been getting harder to tell one from
another.  The fog all around him is isolating, surreal.  The
only signs of life, it seems to him, anywhere, are the grating
comments of crows picking over foul scraps of death.

He needs a break from his blogging. The relentless grinding of
words against words, that had once seemed quasi-sexual, now
seems more like the endless jostling of strangers in a crowd. 
Lately, it seems all he’s been doing is picking at cold
embers, looking for a spark of his old fire.

So, for a change of scene, he browses the vendors’ booths at a
Native American crafts fair.  Handmade flutes fill the air in
the large tent with nasal sounds that resonate in collapsed
caves in his mind.  Smells of leather and herbal tobacco and
incense liven the dead air.  The eternal utility of clay pots
keeps teasing his eyes that keep expecting to see them morph
into something foolish and ephemeral.  The designs in glaze
must explain something, he feels, something he’s been missing,
something he never thought to ask about.  The colors are
exactly right, the shapes are just what they ought to be. 
There can be no mere art here, no whimsy; it all must be
primal truth, eternal and certain and right.  It must be!

In a leap of faith he touches one of the pots, and it’s real. 
Something solid and permanent, something real and true.  He
fondles the pot, nearly kisses it.  He raises it above the
crowd, where light makes it glow.  What does it say?  Like the
mathematician  in “A Beautiful Mind,” he sees in the cobalt
pattern the irreducible blueprint of the bones of the world. 
The wisdom of the ages, not sold in any mall,-there’s no
profit in truth,-made palpable in this creation of earth and
fire.

But why stare at a pot, looking for lessons; that way lies
madness.  Ask the maker himself.  He puts down the pot and
turns toward the vendor, a young Native American with three
black feathers in his hair.  Eyes stare at eyes for a while. 
How to ask for truth, what’s real and what’s cynical
contrivance, what’s lasting and what’s gone tomorrow?

From outside the tent come the cackles of a crow.  It breaks
the spell.  He looks at the young Indian and wonders, in
horror, “Is he smirking?”