Arthur Metcalf stood on the shores of the lake, the glistening lights of sunrise reflecting off of the water. His soul was empty. His heart was empty. His brain struggled to form any concise thought. He was not much more than a pupa now. Existing within a living body, yet with his experiences and thoughts, wisdom and ideas having retreated to an inert section of his brain.
He stood there gazing Eastward opening and closing his mouth to breathe, similarly to what the carp were doing just below the surface of the water a few meters away from where his feet stood. Arthur had a vision of the carp and the other fish and he tried to imagine himself as one of them, with scales and fins and tiny organs, glassy eyes and one sole purpose of existence and survival. His hair was askew, and his glasses smeared. His shirt was buttoned wrong and his sandals were coming apart.
Arthur cleared his throat and looked around. His fish breathing continued. He looked at the hair on his arms, and tried to picture his limbs as scaly, flat and fin-like. His hair had been growing unevenly as of late, so he had huge clumps in some areas, while other spots were smooth and bare. His head was going that way, too. He had even tried doing a search for “uneven hair growth” and saw some extreme images there that made him realize that his tufts were not that worrisome.
Slowly, he released himself from his stupor and thought of his friends, his relations, shared experiences, the kind of brain activity and human attributes that would distinguish himself ontologically from the carp. But he did not think of his foibles. He kept those still hidden away so he would not have to contemplate them. His mind recalled other memories, random moments, that made him move his head around and look at other things, searching for something to set his eyes on as he pulled at a big clump of hair on his arm.
His fish breathing continued and he tried to stop by closing his mouth and aspirating through his nose but he was so congested that he had to open his mouth again to breathe. Some ducks were quacking as a momma swam by with seven ducklings behind her. Arthur thought of differentiation within the species, as he often did. Are some carp better at finding food than others? Are some faster? Were some better helpers than others? Some geese stood amassed along the shoreline, looking all exactly the same to his eye. He gazed over the flock in contemplation. Are some faster flyers? He asked himself. Better leaders? Nicer to the rest of the geese than others? Or were they all pretty much the same and did it matter?
He slapped at a fly on his back, and as he shifted his weight from one leg to another, his thoughts drifted down to the worms under his feet, burrowing through the earth, eating the soil and shitting it back out to make it better, to make it possible for things to grow. How impossible is that, he thought. Their stomachs, if they have such a thing, must be no larger than a peppercorn, and he briefly entertained an image in his mind of a grinder full of worm stomachs held over a salad bowl, the pieces falling down to enrich the taste of the lettuce that the worm stomachs had helped to grow in the first place.
He suddenly wanted to be closer to the worms, these amazing creatures, and the desire filled him with a will to act. He broke off a branch from a nearby oak tree and took out a knife, a pocket knife that he had recently started carrying with him for unknown reasons, and began to carve one end of the branch into a scoop. Thusly, he began digging a hole for himself to get in to be closer to the worms. The thought of death and burial did not escape him, yet it did not deter him either. He continued digging but after about a half an hour, he tired. The indenture was nearly not nearly big enough for him to submerge himself into, just deep enough for him to kneel in it or sit in it, just a few inches deep. He knelt down inside the hole. By this time the joggers were appearing in greater numbers, coming down the paved track, but not noticing him as they went by. He knelt in his hole, quietly, still gazing toward the lake.
Perhaps if he had access to a rocket ship, a space suit, years of astronaut training and more financial resources then he currently enjoyed, Arthur would have launched himself into space and gazed down upon the Earth from high above; and then perhaps turn and face the other direction, contemplating the infinite universe while orbiting round and round our bluish orb. Without this option, he had not intentionally decided but perhaps unconsciously realized it would be more convenient to come down to the lake and dig the hole.
But, had he planned to dig the hole before coming down to the lake, or rather thought of that action subsequently upon his arrival? Perhaps even Arthur himself could not say. He had trouble ordering things in such neat little chronologies, all the little specks of ideas and half-thoughts that he pictured floating around his brain like the meteors and asteroids floating throughout space. No matter how hard he tried, it was difficult for him not to ruminate on such concepts.
By this time, squatting and then kneeling, and then squatting again in his little dugout area, Arthur noticed the sun had climbed a little higher, throwing more light onto his face and making him more conspicuous to passersby, as he remained there hardly moving. The joggers passed by and glanced over. Was he a crazy person? An opioid addict? A yogi? A mindfulness practitioner? A self-referential site-specific performance artist?
The red-winged blackbirds were singing in the branches along the lakeside, calling out to their mates and to the others of their ilk. The other birds were also deep into their daily morning activities of food gathering, nest repair, territorial inspection, egg incubation and care. Some geese walked by where Arthur kneeled, then squatted, pecking at the grass and scanning the area for potential intruders.
He thought about the nomenclature of the setting he had transformed. Was it an opening – if so, to where? an enclosure? The word that his mind seemed to prefer was an indentation. The root and meaning of this word led him to think of indenture – slavery. Was this perhaps a form of self-shackling? Wouldn’t he prefer an escape or liberation activity, rather than self-containment? Or did the imposed limit ironically give him a sense of freedom?
A hole would be another possible descriptor, although maybe it wasn’t deep enough to call it that; and a hole sometimes led to something else. Where he sat and kneeled did not offer that, there was no other end. And the word hole made him think of the word whole. Digging out and removing the soil was not making something whole, quite the opposite. Did he feel more whole sitting there? He was not sure. But he did slowly shake something loose in his psyche, as the sun warmed his face. Thoughts gave way to sensations, feelings.
Maybe, he thought, it would be more accurate to refer to it as a depression. He had dug a depression into the lakeside landscape, a small depression to serve as his contemplative setting. But that word also led him down undesired roads. It signified the feeling of being depressed – unimpressive. Was he depressed? He certainly looked depressed with his downturned lips and sad eyes.
He could suddenly feel ants crawling on this arm, and when he looked down he saw that they were all over him. A rather large swarm of bigger sized ants. They were biting him. “Where did these fucking ants come from?” Arthur blurted out. They totally ruined the mood, if it could be called that, but worse so, they were biting him and it hurt. I just wanted to sit here and feel the earth and think of the worms and be contemplative, he thought. And, now this. Jesus.
He swatted and swatted and slapped at them with the branch he had fashioned into a scoop. Something always intervenes and messes everything up, Arthur angrily thought, feeling victimized by the universe, but he then realized that it was he himself who had come here and dig a little thing, a little thing to sit in, in the ground, so of course that’s where ants lived and it was really his own actions that brought this about. So, his anger at the universe quickly transformed into self-loathing. God, I’m so stupid, he thought, and felt a pain in his stomach, a tightening, which made him feel even worse.
He saw that perhaps some water was needed in this situation, to kill the ants, to drown them. Miraculously, there was an old beach pail sitting under the willow tree directly in front of him. He slowly got up, his old bones creaking, stretched a bit, and then hurried over and filled up the bucket in the lake, coming back a few times with more water until there was a little pool sitting on the bottom of his area. His setting was now altered. He would not be able to sit back in there unless he wanted to get his butt wet. He could still kneel, he thought, kneel there in the wet dug out section of dirt. He decided he did not want to do that. He had to come up with a new plan now, and he slowly walked around his area and over to the lakeshore, wondering what to do next.
As he stared out at the water, some young boys came along and saw the dirt and the water and the pail, and they got an idea. They went and got more water and dumped it into the place and then started to shape the wet earth into cylinders using the pail, thus beginning construction of a sand castle. Arthur was, at first, incensed, but then felt resigned. Of course this is happening, he thought. He sat down next to the area formerly his own. He sat on the grass a few yards away while the boys happily built something out of the wet dirt. At least they are doing something creative with the setting that I had prepared to temporarily house my existence, whereas I just sat there and thought strange thoughts.
One of the boys called out to him. “Is this your hole?”
“Yes. Well, no. I dug it but it’s not mine. You are certainly entitled to…”
The boys had stopped listening to Arthur after a few words of his response and had gone back to playing. Arthur didn’t know quite what to do so he just there a few feet away as the boys built away. The creative activity had inspired Arthur and gave him an idea, as he immediately felt ashamed of his decision that morning to come down to the lake and sit in a hole. What had seemed so tangibly important, essential even, just an hour or so before, now held no rhyme nor reason whatsoever. He had wanted to escape the feeling of goals and aspirations and the sense of doom that usually accompanied them. This made him think of his parents, strangely, and whether they had treated him right, as he sat there and watched the boys play contentedly.
Nothing is permanent, Arthur thought, as he continued his ruminations. Everything changes, yet, in time, it comes back, he muttered to himself. Some things, anyway. The geese, over there greedily chomping at the grass, for example. They are migratory. They leave, heading south, and then return. But what if it is different geese that come back in the Spring, Arthur thought, different ones than the ones that left. Or maybe they are the same geese as the ones who left, but they have changed, emotionally, and now they are different. He wanted to honor each individual goose, and think of them as just a flock.
The boys gave up on their attempts at building a sand castle, for as carefully as they tried to empty the bucket, the sand pillars kept collapsing. They started throwing the mud around, which made Arthur frustrated. He relaxed his body and laid down in the grass, and slowed his breathing. He thought he spotted a fox out of the corner of his eye, peeking out from behind the thistles. Hie fixed his eyes there, and indeed, there was a fox. And then the fox told him something. “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
The boys left and Arthur got up, stretching his legs and inched closer to the shoreline. He could see some fish beneath the surface of the water, opening and closing their mouths, waiting for a bug or a worm, anything they could swallow and be nourished by.
THE MOSSY BOG 