I am a cerebral meteorologist. As such I am preoccupied with the examination of all sorts of Brain-Storms. Case in point. Recently I was attending a curious young woman. She presented wearing a vibrant chartreuse green dress and an even more elaborate and striking “hair piece” I suppose you would call it. It was a sort of basket or better yet, a nest of twigs adorned with small colorful birds. I was not sure if she was channeling the 17th Century or the 23rd, either way it was impressive.
Early in our encounters I asked her,
“Elle (not her real name) Elle,” Where dose the darkness come from?”
Her answer took me by surprise, though I would come to learn it should not have…
She paused in her characteristically pensive way. I repeated the question.
“Elle, where does the darkness come from?”
“The weakness of the Infinity of Numbers.” She finally answered.
Indeed. I had already been informed by her “there are no straight lines in nature” so it should not come as a surprise, that for her – the certainty of numbers was also a myth.
On another occasion when we had been sitting for several minutes without sharing a sound or a look, she suddenly broke our silence to announce,
“I’d rather have a turtle than a pony.”
“Why is that?,” I enquired.
“Well, for one thing – The Sky. But also, a turtle wouldn’t throw you from its back and leave you laying there wondering how far away everything is.”
Probably unadvisedly, but I couldn’t resist, I enquired further
“Do you feel far away, Elle?.”
Without hesitation she chirped, “Oh no not me. I’m always right where I can be found. It’s everything else that’s too far out of reach. But I don’t care. I have the Birds.”
“The ones in your hair you mean?”
“No silly, The Birds. These (she points randomly in the general direction of her head) these are just for show. I mean the real Birds.”
“The real birds?” I mused.
“Water you know doesn’t just run downstream. You know? It falls from The Sky. It turns to ice and stays put. Sometimes it gets excited and goes back home to The Sky. Like the Birds. They know the Water. The Birds and the Water are best friends. I had ice cubes up there (pointing again toward her head) but they melted. That’s what everything does. It turns into something else. There’s no stopping it. So no use pretending.”
And she fell catatonically silent again.
Our next session I asked her,” have you heard from the Birds or the Water since we last met?”
“Oh of course. They always know where to find me.”
“Care to let me in on what they had to share?”
She took another of her iconic pauses and finally leaned forward, an atypical move for her, and half whispered,
“They wanted to remined me that I am a compass.”
“Really. How so?”
“Well you see, we all have a notion of True North somewhere deep inside us. We sense it. Sometimes you can catch a glimpse of it. But we get pulled off it. You know what people say about losing your bearings. That’s sort of it. But really, it’s more like, I am the compass. I feel True North. I want True North as my cardinal direction. So, the Water and the Birds, they warned me. Beware of Magnetic North. It may only be 6 degrees off, 6 degrees away, but Magnetic North, it’s a cunning Fool. And wants to Trick you. They will tell you it’s 21 degrees, or 20, but I already told you about the weakness of numbers.
It’s 6.
She paused briefly then burst out,
“Magnetic personalities!”
“Beware of anyone with a magnetic personality. They are just there to draw you off course. Surely you’ve heard about “the 6 degrees of separation.” It’s a trick. It’s a ruse intended to make people believe they are “almost” connected. Almost the same being. But it’s a lie. It’s a placation trying to make up for the fact you’ve lost connection to your own True North.
That’s why I don’t care how far away everything is. And why I don’t want a pony.
I want to be right here. inside me. inside True North.”
She slowly folded her thin arms one over the other, tilting her head toward the window.
“Do you see that rainbow?” she asked.
I strained my vision toward the window. It took a moment of searching with my watery eyes. Finally, I could see it. Emanating from the beveled edge of the antique glass pain, there it was. The setting sun was being cut into tiny silvers. Casting a narrow beam of colored light along a door frame across the room.
“Isaac Newton new the Birds and the Water. They told me about him. They were the ones who showed him how to build camara obscuras and how to make prisms too.”
Elle stood up and tugged downward on her dress. She always wore the same dress. Always. She had told me once how she read that, at an early point in his career, Albert Einstein decided to have 3 identical suites made. He felt everything else was so import he couldn’t be bothered wasting time with something as trivial as deciding what to wear each day. So he always wore the same thing. So does Elle.
It’s her favorite dress.