Journal Entry 1311: Cecil Miller

I have this image in my head sometimes when I'm deep into listening to a song, of a black sock and a white sock spinning back and forth in the air, swirling around each other, locked in a battle of dominion. Whose direction will win? All in a singular universe where there is nothing else that may be seen save a background pool of bright golden light and the sound of music thumping madly, the two socks, yinning and yanging back and forth in time to the music.

Slowly, as the music washes over me and loud guitars twang away on top of syncopation and thundering bass, a shifting glissando of keyboard swinging through everything, the socks change form and shape, morphing into two wet tadpole-like creatures — catfish maybe: wet, coated with primordial fluids, but still beating out a rhythm. A white catfish and a shining indigo-black catfish arguing about which of them shall have dominion over Time in my head. Back and forth, up and down, in and out. Somewhere, something physical or mechanical in my brain is actually working up this set of stupid images, even though I know I'm just sitting in my living room, eyes closed, no longer sure if I'm even breathing. There is though, I'm sure of it, some actual functioning set of cells projecting this hologram into my mind. Calories burn off as these creatures go back and forth in their dance.

None of this should be surprising. We are, first of all, obviously hooked into Time through sex. And sex is as animal and pure and natural an activity as there is — save for taking a crap and letting the laws of pressure and gravity evacuate our bladders in tropically warm streams of golden fluid. Life happens from the inside out and so does rhythm. Primeval. We can't escape our past. We can't escape genetics. We can only revel in finding new meanings in the codes of our parents.
This image of the socks and the tadpole catfish may not actually be a figment of imagination at all. It may, in fact, be the discovery of a mental mechanism. I may have stumbled onto at least the representation of that part of the nervous system that joins consciousness to the physical body and the linkage which melds the body and mind as one with time. The botanist and psychedelic pioneer, Terence McKenna, thinks he found it with the ampersand sign … maybe he just didn't get it exactly right.

It's not like rhythm should be seen as some supreme, human quality that puts us in touch with the gods or makes us immortal; that it's yet more proof we have dominion over nature. It's there in all animals in one form or another. Watch cats scratch themselves, watch fish swim, the hummingbird hover, or dogs dig holes in the ground. It's always there. It has to be. Rhythm is one of those overlooked survival tools of mind-body that allows organisms of all kinds to function and survive. It is so basic and at the root of just being an animal in the world that we don't think about it. Or when we do, we keep it on some higher plane. And so we miss what it really is. Simple as that. We try not to think of our many commonalities with other animals. Somehow they seem proof to us that we are nothing more than hunks of warm flesh with mobility.

And so we miss the most important truths, for surely those mechanisms of instinct and pure mental connection that are as much a part of birds and reptiles as humans are the most important and well developed of all cognitive processes available to us. It is, indeed, those inexplicably simple, ignored, and even belittled elements of existence that are quite possibly the ones with which we can link ourselves to the cosmos and to each other.