PROSE

Matchbox Cars & the Pygmy Poet

The meanderings of a fool waiting for his muse

I confess there are times I spend much of Bakersfield’s hot summer afternoons staring through the glass door of my Allstate Insurance office and across the parking lot to Columbus Avenue. About half way up that door, Matchbox cars zip from behind the closed Venetian blinds of my west window, across the door, just above the top of the open sign, and beneath the east window’s closed blinds.

And vice-versa. East to west. The street the cars are on is not really halfway up the door. It just appears to be. And while I’m in the mood of righting that lie, I’ll tell you the cars are really full-sized, and just seem to be the size of Matchbox model cars. Now that I’ve spoiled the illusion, I’ll move on. I once listened to Joseph Campbell on my cassette player as I rode my stationary bike at home. For those of you who have not heard of Joseph Campbell allow me to smile with just a hint of condescension and tell you he was a great mythologist and human being. On that day on that cassette, he was explaining, as my legs and lungs were getting stronger, that a particular tribe of Pygmies, I believe from the Amazon, lived in the dense forest where everything pressed in around them. Just green in all its variation. There were no clearings. In their life there was no such thing as distant. Everything was nearly within reach. Well, it happened that a Pygmy from this tribe was taken out of the forest and brought to an expansive plain. There, off in the distance, were animals, probably elephants, or most likely giant apes, but that part isn’t important. What was important was that the Pygmy had no concept of relativity in terms of distance. The animals, which might have been 200 yards away, were no bigger, to his way of thinking, than the blowfly that crawled up his arm. To tell him he wouldn’t be able to reach out and take that elephant or ape between his thumb and forefinger and crush the life out of it would have been absurd to him — unless he reckoned it was poisonous, like a spider — but that just muddies the point. Speaking of points, muddied or not, there is a point I’m angling toward. It is this: If you were to take one such Pygmy from the compressed environment of the Amazon forest, bring the little guy blindfolded to sit in my office chair, face the chair toward the door, then remove the blindfold, what would he tell you he saw? Dispensing with the irrelevancy of not knowing what cars (or glass doors or windows for that matter) were called, I’m certain he would report the objects as simply appearing, or perhaps being birthed, from behind one side of the blinds and subsequently disappearing, or dying, behind the other side. In other words, the Pygmy would observe it, naturally, as it occurred. An illiterate, or more accurately, unliterate poet. The literate (that is, civilized) poet would have to struggle mightily to see it with fresh eyes, as the Pygmy did, and then scour his civilized mind for the words to approximate it. The Pygmy views his new world as metaphor. Enlightened man looks at things in his own old world as palpably familiar to him as an old sock, then describes it as a simile — the unknown approximating the known. He fills in the gaps he can’t see with his own personal knowledge. Guesswork. Creative trial and error. At those times when I sit and stare at the cars, I often let my mind follow those thoughts and let them inevitably escort me back to Plato’s cave, to appearance versus reality, maybe even to Jesus’ little children, who, unless you become as, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Metaphor. Simile. Usually, though, I just sit and stare. I don’t think a whole lot. I stare past the street of zipping cars (just accepting the truth of what they are), at the barren field on the other side of the chain length fence that lines the far side of the street. Angling away from the street, an ugly string of apartments, like a row of bad teeth, follow the course of the canal, empty now that no more snow is melting in the mountains to feed it. When the canals are full, children always seem to drown in them, ignoring the signs that announce: “Stay Out — Stay Alive!” But I suppose children drown in pools, swimming holes, creeks, rivers and oceans, too. Wherever they needlessly choose to drown, it’s always a waste. I cannot see the mountains from my office chair. I can only see a tatter of foothills through the scrub trees that grow in the riverbed a mile away. My insurance office is squeezed between three other businesses — a 7–11 store and a laundromat to my left and an H & R Block office to my right — in a small strip mall in Bakersfield, California. Alas! Bakersfield.

Home of Buck Owens. Home of Merle Haggard. Home of the Bakersfield sound, called also, Nashville West.

Home of an illiterate Pygmy-minded poet, slackjaw-staring at Matchbox cars zipping out from under one set of venetian blinds across the door and under the other.

A Pygmy-minded poet, waiting for his muse who appears to be late again.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Note that copyright registration and trademark symbols ( ® and ™ ) have been removed from the story to lessen reader distraction, but are included here:

Allstate ® Matchbook ™ H & R Block ® 7–11 ®