NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
The line outside the Post Office extends into the parking lot and looks longer with social distancing.
Sophie is leaning on her quarterstaff; a deep brown length of sapling a few inches taller than she. The warm patina suggests it would now be a mature tree, had it been left in the ground. Her grip will hold on the nobbles, where branches were trimmed.
“I never should have come here on a Saturday morning!”
“No, this time of year is worst of all.”
More people join the line behind us, while the front seldom moves.
“How long have you been standing here, Sophie?”
“Only a few minutes. Five or six people joined the line ahead of me as I walked over here.”
“Well, it gives you time to think and observe.”
“Yes, look at all the boxes and packages up ahead.”
“Each one adds another minute or two!”
“And exposes the clerks to more risk!”
Three busses pass slowly on the parkway, headed for the parking lot nearby.
“Such a noisy place!”
“Does it give you a headache?”
“Ha! This traffic makes it hard to get my messages.”
“I know, our phones never stop.”
“No, I mean, stuff from the other room.”
“What room?”
“Where dream people gather, you might say.”
“Might I?”
“Yes, if you were trying to characterize the visitors.”
“What visitors?”
“Presences.”
“Do you feel they are part of you?”
“I know they are when they step out.”
“Welcome to Macadamia land!”
“Politics is getting out of place.”
“The ‘Kulturkampf’ has spread like a disease.”
“It might be a good idea to silence all the phones for a week!”
“Covid is the actual virus and the virtual virus infects politics.”
“There is no vaccine, but silence.”
“No ‘factcine’, either, facts are just road-kill, now.”
“The word is meaningless.”
“What word?”
“Fact!”
“What do you mean?”
“Facts and opinions, I mean what’s the difference, the way those words are used now?”
“Oh, you refer to ‘alternative facts’.”
“Those are beliefs!”
“President Macadamia has turned into our new prophet.”
“Yes, he is leading the way to a new religion.”
“Belief, isn’t that what religion is about?”
“We talk about it that way, yes.”
“Believers read his words on their phones and they are inspired.”
“He is the first president to be able to bypass regular media.”
“He said, he ‘didn’t need’ them.”
Sophie leans on her staff.
“And people are so moved at his rallies!”
“Witness, Macadamian miracles!”
“What miracles? So much of it is lies!”
“The revelation to themselves of their unexpressed feelings.”
“It is more like mass hallucination!”
“Hallucination, belief, it can be a fine line.”
“How about, self-deception?”
“It is hard to give up cherished beliefs. That’s is an old story. You must know that!”
“Sure, but this is supposed to be an election campaign, not a séance.”
“It has always been both. I know, I keep an open door to the other room.”
“What is this room? Are you Maxwell’s demon?”
“This is nothing to do with thermodynamics!”
“We can take that up at The Pie Shop.”
“We were just talking about it. The room we can never enter, but it opens on to our room.”
“You mean the unconscious?”
“I don’t use that term.”
“Why not?”
We have moved forward in line, not getting too close to the big man ahead.
“The metaphor is exhausted, and I think, misleading.”
“The term is well established in psychological practice.”
“Psychology! What nonsense!”
“Why?”
“I don’t mean anything psychological. Psychology is not a mystery. It is psychology. I mean the mystery of existence.”
“Ah, why is there something rather than nothing?”
“There is a mystery at the center of each person and at the center of the Universe.”
“Oh yes, black holes and all that.”
“That is interesting, but I mean something else.”
“And what is that?”
“Have you ever seen a thought?”
“Yes, books full.”
“No, no, no, those are rendered. I mean a thought itself?”
“Well, no. One might see an impulse on a scan.”
“But the thought, the occurrence in consciousness. You can’t see that.”
“No”
“No psychologist can observe it.”
“So what?”
“I, Sofonisba Anguissola, have lived on the threshold, for seventy-odd years and I know a mystery when I find one.”
“The mystery of psychology, you mean?”
“I mean discomfort has become a way of life.”
“Discomfort with what?”
“With being in the world, with ‘Dasein’, with cultural adaptation.”
“So, you feel like a misfit.”
“I am not the misfit!”
“OH! so you think the rest of us are?”
“I think we live with misconception.”
“You think the rest of us are wrong, but you are right!”
“I am not as wrong as those who think they know.”
“So, you are a Socratic skeptic.”
We have moved as far as the step up to the door. The big guy has his hand on the bar ready to hold it open when the next person comes out.
“Well, I don’t accept rubbish!”
“Psychology, you mean?”
“Yes, think of these wealthy psychiatrists prescribing drugs and doctors prescribing drugs. All to protect us from the mystery! While the kid selling weed on the street gets a beating from the police and years in jail.”
“Those professions have helped a lot of troubled people.”
“That weed, and some of those illegal drugs, can ease your way to the threshold.”
“They can do a lot of damage too.”
Sophie pounds the bottom of her staff on the ground.
“So does delusion!”
“Uncertainty is hard to live with, you know. One wants something substantial.”
“Yes, one has religion and its offspring, psychology.”
Sophie is looking at the big guy with no mask, as he moves his carton from one arm to the other.
“Do you hear prophetic voices?”
A mail jeep runs slowly past toward the post office.
“What was that?”
“I said, do you hear prophetic voices?”
“As ambiguous as the Delphic Oracle.”
“Really! Can you give me an example?”
We put on our masks, ready to go in.
“Yes, as I sat down to look in my Grimoire this morning. There was an interruption; ‘I am going to carry this cloth, these threads, and shreds to’ and that is all I got.”
“That is all you heard in your head.”
“It isn’t really an auditory experience.”
“Yours is metaphorical noise.”
“I overhear something from the other room, and it has a presence of its own. Not analogous to any sensation, I mean.”
“Intuitions?”
“Perhaps, they are, I am sure, they are part of our common humanity.”
The big guy will be next through the door. He turns, leans forward, and glares down at Sophie.
She steps back holding her staff out of his reach.
“Where’s your mask?”
He says nothing, and shuffles forward a bit, bending slightly lower.
Sophie steps back again.
“What do you mean, our common humanity?”
“It’s right here.”
“What?”
“We are standing, talking in this line, aren’t we?”
“Yeah, so what?”
“So, we have that in common.”
“We have nothing in common.”
The big guy must be over six foot six. He has to move his head to one side to go through the door. When he comes out, he blocks the way for a moment.
“As far as I am concerned, you two are the enemy!”
He lets the door close behind him and walks into the parking lot.
“That’s was weird!”
“There’s the danger!”
“Him, you mean?”
“He is only one manifestation; has no idea who he is.”
“Seems to me he had a pretty clear idea.”
“Oh no, he is undone, a loose thread.”
“Oh, the ‘cloth’?”
“Well, ‘the threads and shreds’, it is an old metaphor.”
“I noticed you kept your distance.”
“I did not want him to grab my staff.”
“Why would he want to?”
“Couldn’t you sense the violence in him?”
“I guess so, now you mention it.”
“So, if he did come at me, I would put my staff in his way and trip his weight to the ground.”
“That takes some skill!”
“Practice over these many years.”
