BY JAN HAAG
66 + 1/4 - 2
IN THE PETERSON ROOM OF THE ALLEN LIBRARY
3-4-00
The elegant Petersen Room had a window as big around as the harvest
moon,
bigger, perhaps, as big as the moon near the summit of Beverly Glen that
surprised
me so decades ago that, being unable to remember having seen anything so
huge,
so round, so luminous hanging in the sky guarding Mulholland Drive's
ramparts, I cried aloud
(to myself, being alone) "My God, What's That?!" -- having temporarily
(probably at 46 +) forgotten
about full moons that glow in the sky, especially the clear,
charcoal-blue,
California, night sky, a little oftener than once a
(out-of-phase, Gregorian) month.
From that window, bigger around (it depends on where one is in the
universe)
than the harvest moon, I could see the landscape surrounding Lake
Washington,
the winter trees, gray water, gray gloom, the fine gray pinnacles of the
University's,
not-yet-century-old, Academic Gothic buildings, and brick and stone, and
concrete
paths across the green, rain-drop-enhanced lawns. Four stories seems a
great height
when the window comes down past one's knees, and stands twice as high as
one's head
making one feel as if one could step out of it, like one gliding through
an Oriental Moon-gate
into the hovering mist below, silent and
alone.
There were great windows all around, only one of them round, but with
vistas superb.
The room was huge and inhabited by luxurious,
gold-brown, leather couches and chairs, and an oval
table bigger than
the "Moon-gate". No one sat but me. They were drinking wine; I drank
orange
juice. Two kind women spoke to me (out of phase) in the
academic circle, closed, and fittingly
self-congratulatory over a brilliant, one-day conference, just concluded, about publishing,
cyberspace, an opening sortie in the questioning of publish or perish,
of tenure, promotion
criteria, of Capitalistic society where writers
get honor, and publishers
get rich off research funded by the
Government, the U, and other NGOs.
Well-meaning, I blessed the two women, and all the others, there was
hardly a thought
the whole day that I had disagreed with, yet I cried
on the way home on the bus, in the rain
having reached that age of
discouragement, of sadness-knowing, attraction-repulsion
toward the way
things are. I nodded at the miniature daffodils newly out in the
twilight
standing ankle-deep in their dark brown mounds with their
corona's down, never looking
at the too-big moon or the Moon-gate,
though there was one, in an AIDS House near my home.
The Oriental
influence is felt deeply along the Pacific Rim in Seattle on the Puget
Sound
near the edge of Earth's dominant country
which inhabits a medium-sized continent where people mean
well, and most things go wrong.
Why? Probably because some fraction of
us wants to live forever, be richer than their neighbor.
But this was
ever so -- except for a few (mostly disregarded) experiments in
Benevolence, Ahimsa,
Compassion, and now the new experiment in
Cyberspace, which, if not suppressed, policed, smothered
by
e-Commerce, ranked in or out by the Academic elite, has given to the human
race a voice to be heard
by anyone making their free (click here)
choice, a place to be published "at-large" without being
sanctioned by the vested interests who have appointed themselves guardians
of this civilization
which leads us into despair, perpetual killing,
business as usual, nightly starvation on TV.
Copyright © 2000 Jan Haag
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Jan Haag may be reached via e-mail: jhaag@u.washington.edu
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BY JAN HAAG