THE WILDERNESS OF MY ROOM

Like any space, every room begins as a wilderness-- and if the right kind of person has lived in it for a year or two, it becomes even moreso. Take for example my room: a special preserve, I call it, and I like to keep it that way, it's a matter of psychoecology, which is very important to me.

All my life I've done the best I could in that regard, working hard to preserve at least one remnant of wilderness in my daily life despite mothers, aunts, teachers and latterly, master sergeants and wives. As a result of those early and ongoing struggles I more than ever consider it my primal duty, on behalf of humankind, to foster the natural state of things. I therefore try to keep my room as close to that condition (natural plus ultra) as possible so I don't lapse into the illusory danger of thinking that I have my room under control and that even more could be under my control (today my room; tomorrow etc.). Hitler and Mussolini, a couple of obsessively punctilious guys, were like that: they had very neat rooms that led inevitably to spiffy uniforms and the illusion of neat countries, neat neighboring countries, neat populations etc.

The neat room is a dangerous illusion, as history is de facto continuously pointing out to society at large via various financial, political, religious and activist groups of righteous room cleaners and organizers of the human race in general, but we in the developed world never seem to learn, because we insist on trying to get all our kids to clean all their rooms, thereby instilling in them the erroneous belief (as with most beliefs) not only that it should be done, but that it can be done. "A place for everything and everything in its place" is the most inimical and least natural thing I've ever heard, it is the seed of tyranny. Il Duce had that embroidered on his underwear. This is where it gets insidious, or is it invidious... My dictionary is around here somewhere... In this corner I think, at the bottom of that stack under the lantern... Used to be with my thesaurus, which because of this pile of hats I just moved to-- hey this is interesting, I don't think I've ever read this, didn't know I had it, it's in the neopile-- discovery is a wonderful thing.

Shelves, for example, and drawers and their desks or whatever, impart the chronic and tragic misapprehension that our own thoughts, hence our creativity, are organized in such a way, when creativity clearly indicates otherwise (as evidenced by its loss through pigeonhole education). This has led for example to all the terrible poetry etc. we've had to endure down the ages, in amounts far exceeding the sublime bits that survive less and less each year, that came straight out of one wild room or another, created by the diminishing defenders of domestic wilderness.

Neatness interferes, whereas wilderness prevents senility, ever honing the mind to new sharpness. You think Einstein had a neat mind? DaVinci's was a mess; Beethoven, forget it. Creativity is anarchic, unpredictable and cannot be summoned, as can the devil of neatness. No discovery in the room, no discovery in the resident. That's a paraphrase of a Frost quote I've got in a book right about there, under the beeswax candles in one of those boxes in the corner, under the sweaters. Being one with the wilderness, like Tarzan or Geronimo, I know where all the vines, hideouts and escape routes are (there's a river in that direction, there's a butte over there, a canyon beyond etc.), which is quite enough to be getting on with. One only needs so much knowledge of where key things are; the rest is clutter.

My room has been purposely kept wild because at least some places on earth should be kept free of human interference, maintained as reverential venues where the primordial can still be experienced (such places are disappearing by the day). What greater insight can be gained in this modern world than by daily reminders of our primal origins, leading to fundamental understanding of what is truly possible? A room in its essence is our one clear chance at letting the world run free, insofar as this can be done in an enclosed space for which you're paying rent, mortgage, maintenance, depreciation or whatever, paid for via time spent in a painfully neat office, so why waste what may be one's only opportunity to experience the primordial on a regular basis?

In any case, its folly to argue with entropy; look at what it does to dictators.

You'll find none of that in my room.

THE FRIDGE ON THE BALCONY

Lately, our refrigerator seems to be acquiring a domineering personality. I know that in using the "p" word in regard to a mere machine I am crossing a tacit boundary into no-no territory, a place no one ever goes except in very remote theory bandied about in academic chambers or in radical sci-fi, but even though it's just an inkling I'm having, it's pretty damn big for an inkling, and it inkles with a disturbing resonance.

It's only the refrigerator so far, but can the stereo, the washing machine, the PC, the van, be far behind? (These devices are, after all, by their very nature, in this together...) Perhaps this change in personality is temporary, and due merely to power fluctuations; though perhaps, more sinisterly, it is due to corporate planning, or even to unknown evolutionary powers of programmed silicon.

Who can predict the future of open-ended "progress," any more than we can know the end result of a seeded tomato that glows in the dark and tastes like tobacco, or a reproductive insect that despises onions and sings Mozart? Where is the end in all this? And is that end a reward or a punishment? No one knows of course, since we haven't been here before, which is one of the drawbacks of one-track 4-dimensional living. Nevertheless, the end result has been anticipated in all the myths, if one cares to look with other than educated eyes.

But to get back to the refrigerator: when left open, it used to say, briefly and politely (I'm anthropomorphizing some electronic beeps here, refrigerator voices are still fairly primitive) "Excuse me, but..." or "I say, master..." or "Would you mind perhaps saving yourself some electricity by..." but recently, due to some kind of unilateral siliconic mutation, the fridge has begun sounding more like Il Duce on a bad day: "Hey, bonehead!" or "Yeah, I mean you! GET-OVER-HERE-NOW and shut my damn door!!" or "Drop what you're doing and shut this before I shut you!!" We're not exactly bowing yet, but circuits are tireless things, whereas we are but creatures of flesh and blood that must earn incomes and invade oil-rich countries to keep our essential machines running.

There have been indications that it could be some kind of vast corporate conditioning of the consumer in preparation for ever more egregious and domineering product lines that actually force their purchase, leading to the eventual corporate-controlled electromechanical world takeover, whose imminence we all sense in many current office-holders, and each time we note that our own machines themselves are surpassing us in the IQ department, always staying just a bit beyond reach of our programming ability, flashing their taunting lights in our faces night and day, running up our power bills behind our backs and beyond our control then phasing out, necessitating our purchase of even more advanced models that make us feel even more inferior to them, until if we unplug them for any length of time they make us start over from scratch when at last we are forced to plug them in again.

And like any incipient dictator, the fridge is deaf to the admonitions of a mere user like myself, who must sleep and eat, can be caught off guard and has only the instruction manual provided. I suppose that the day I come home to a crowd of appliances madly cheering below the balcony whence the refrigerator is declaiming a new world order is the day I should start to worry. Or maybe I should start to worry now.