In a world of acceleration, the sadoo slows down; even stops. In a world of specialization and consequent ideology, the sadoo skims across the ocean of knowledge in his scatoo and the only thing he knows is the waves. In a world scared of darkness and silence, the sadoo avoids neither light nor noise but they seem to him simply different faces of night. The busy heap is busy buzzing, being anxious. About money, security, reputation, love, health, and--behind it all--that great diffused monolith, death. The bedsheets of memory, the duvets of hope, are happy escapes.
What does the sadoo do? He laughs and dances and eats and breaks his celibacy vows when necessary. When money happens, it happens; when it doesn't, it doesn't. So with love and death. Does he notice a difference in quality between having and lacking? How could he? The world is always full and verdant and he is in the world. Every day is much the same, every day is entirely new.
This particular sadoo--Sadoo Diaper--has taken recently to sleeping on a foam mat on the floor and performs a twice-daily pilgrimage to store and retrieve his mat and bedding. He views this as a comic ritual. Ritual--and thus serious--in that it occurs regularly and reminds him of old unspeakable things--as a dog might piss at a space where a church wall once stood. Comic in that the gap between the modesty of his sadoo-mat and the glory of the mighty mattresses he has had seems like no gap (he sleeps just as well, dreams as pleasantly) and he chuckles at the non-difference. He chortles at the thought that the only difference is that he makes a daily silly pilgrimage, which he ponders and enjoys.
The only hero left is the non-hero. So as bumbling Bloom is to Odysseus, the farting sadoo is to Buddha, we all--absurd, passionate, and mortal--are to the swirling forces of life (once named the gods) that cast us up, swirl us around, and soon enough feed us to monsters and flowers.
The sadoo is free not by exercising his will, expanding the artifacts and prosthetics around him, or attempting to nail his name to the sky ... but by watching the clouds blot out the moon and hearing a cat's bell tinkle in the distance.
I've witnessed this powerful/forgettable ritual numerous times= the sadoo's herculean, emaciated bod bowed beneath heaviness of the featherlight foam, the tortured, bouncy gait as though caught in the tension of coming and going. As he passes the sunlit living room, his tilted face, half veiled by penumbra born of tired sun and sparse tree line, half lost in his own shadow, speaks agony and joy at once. The sadoo flirts with extremity but never long enough to be marooned on its shores, so far away from the nameless middle.
ReplyDeleteIf the Sadoo is not mistaken, Mr. Venken has even left a token turd of ritualistic gratitude in the penumbra's limen.
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