One the oddest things happened to me;
On a break of a rare sunny day,
Parked my feet in the lot 'hind Ocean State,
Where the semi-trucks take their tea.
It was unusually warm for February, so I took a walk through Peterborough, my mind feeling restful, passing behind the department store, when by an inspiration I pulled out my notebook. I wrote the thought which came to me, a maxim about the relationship between man and the animals. This topic was much on my mind those days and I had undergone unexpected, even reluctant shifts in worldview. But I cannot remember what I wrote in my notes for two reasons. First, because I wrote it in Italian, but I don't know Italian. Second, because after reading it once over, the words disappeared from the paper.
~
Walking around in my hometown, Dublin (not Ireland), I tried to clear my head.—But wait! I wasn't done telling my first story. Back to that:
~
Now inspirations have a life of their own, but this was something else! Where did it go? It—the thought, not the words—went across the planet, into the mind of one pacific ocean shrimp who lived where no man has ever been. I learned this when a thought was sent back my way, saying, "Oh my God! You have made me realize what I could never have thought, and you are a very wise man! I will be your servant and you will be my master!"
Uhhh-oh. . . . Oh no. . . . What can be done? How will he cope? If one abstract thought, of any kind, was actually forced into a shrimp, was actually understood, then it couldn't help but create with it in him the whole faculty of reason, implying with it a cascade of concepts previously inaccessible. How would he relate to his own kind? This is now, properly speaking, a person, all alone. What could be done? Nothing, but to make it worse. So I walked away, most ill at ease.
~
Walking up the hill from behind the Dublin town hall, I ran into a friend. He was big and boisterous. I needed to get this off my chest, so I told him what had happened with the shrimp. Well, he thought it was hilarious!
"Yesssss!" he burst in laughter. "You are awesome! Haha! Oh, that's so great!"
"Uh, well, I don't know," I mumbled. "I don't know that that should have happened."
To my relief we dropped the subject and kept walking in the direction of my parents' old house. We ran into two friends of ours, two girls who joined us for the walk. Hardly had we said hello when my boisterous friend spilled the story, according to his condensed interpretation.
"Hey, check it out, check it out! He declared his superiority to a shrimp and the shrimp declared its inferiority to him!"
That wasn't how I explained it, but I didn't know how to explain it and didn't want any more conversation about this. The other two looked amused, though not nearly as much as him. I was worried they thought I was such a pitiful egomaniac that I looked for shrimp just to assert myself.
"Yeah," I said, "it was really weird. I don't know why that happened, but I can't really do anything about it, so yeah. Uhm... But yeah." I didn't really have a way to conclude it. I just wanted the topic dropped.
Thankfully, we dropped the subject for real this time. We continued walking a fair ways. About halfway to our old house, where Old Country Road joined Main Street, we stopped by the way where the woods opened out to a marsh about fifty feet wide. The sun was setting. I was quickly immersed in the beautiful view, as if I had been long meditating. It was soothing to the eye as pastels. I was momentarily relieved of what burdened my mind, but I quickly returned to the guilt of what I had done. Still, it was something of a rest, so I took it.
---
I dreamt a continuation of this dream years later. Part 2 will be posted later.
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