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I had had a later caffeine hit than usual and, suffering a kind of near-sighted ennui, I went out for a late night Benz ride. Even on a 55 degree Fahrenheit August evening that old Bavarian limo needs a few minutes to warm before I drop it into gear. But what an idle! The whole neighbourhood jerks awake, I'm sure. Even two cylinder John Deere tractors with their petcocks wheezing and popping and fly wheels whirring are quieter on their start-ups than is this Teutonic nightmare.
But I love to drive it.
To draw no attention to that sojourn, I drive as though a cop were right on my tail and I am talking to myself the whole trip through. No radio. No taped music. Just a single whiskey baritone voice trying to make some sense out of things.
Now talking out loud, alone, is a surrogate memory process. What one hears himself saying becomes indelible thought, as though it had been recorded in longhand or on a tape recorder.
Now, at 2:59 AM, I'm at my Underwood Standard trying to remember what I had said about magnetism and gravity while I drove those fifty or so city miles, just noodling a set of wheels down the town. As far as I can remember as I sit in front of this clattering qwerty-board, these are the words I had uttered earlier tonight:
I'm heading somewhere, but I don't know where. Just cruisin' my town, waiting for a telepathic signal that says, "Here, Dean! Come here!" It's One AM and I'm waiting for the message. Then I'll go there. I'll gravitate there.
Pretty weird, you say? Driving around at One AM waiting for telepathic directions? Try a psychiatric emergency entrance, you say? But a cruise like this is not really so weird. We human beings are attracted toward certain energy sources – repelled by others. And to discover what it is we gravitate toward, we have to make a few subjective decisions about ourselves. Even as atoms and their subatomic constituents have been given descriptors like charm, gefeltig or cringe, so do we have characteristics that, when properly identified, will help us discover the nature of the mass, energy, intellect, spirit or class that draws us to its core.
This seems to imply that we are drawn to like-beings.
But the science surrounding any thinking about gravity, magnetism, or electromagnetic attraction and repulsion insists that like polarities repel, and the flash between the opposite poles of a pair of terminals on fully-charged batteries suggests that the heat, light and crackle that accompanies that connection makes a fiery if not violent contact. North attracts South. Ask any lodestone.
Yet, in this quest for what drives me tonight, I discover that the place I was heading toward out of habit wasn't really the place I wanted to be at all.
A room full of sycophants and pollyannas pretending? 'Uh 'uh!
Somewhere on Groat Road before I decide what to do at the Bridge intersection (one way's downtown, the other's up) it occurs to me that we gravitate toward the perfect attractor, the one that's just right for our perceived personality, whether it's harmonic or dissonant or downright deadly. We may have been temporarily deflected by some other energy source -- one whose core energy we're aiming for right now, and we seem comfortable with decision to be in that space of choice. But, where in the world would we rather be?
Let's be honest. We all know where our habituation takes us. And we also have an inkling of where we'd rather be if we give our intuition the benefit of a doubt.
There's the challenge -- finding that core of densities, energies, talents, intellects, lightnesses, spiritualities, barely imaginable aspects, senses of humour, nearly un-nameable environments -- but let's try to visualize the physical space. Got it? Now, populate it.
Imagine people there. Remember, this population is a creation of that same imagination you used a few minutes ago when you determined the salient features of your own character.
Is the pull caused by like forces ironically attracting? Or unlike forces challenging? What deviates us from our quest? If nothing, then we have arrived! The search is over! We've been drawn and there we are, held nearly metaphysically to the energy core we find ourselves adhering to. And if anything deflected our path, it's time we willed ourselves toward that other sphere of influence -- that larger, deeper attraction.
Gravitate!
We must gravitate!
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