Some Stuff about Being Sorted by Density

"Natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit."

All this suspicion of natural impulses that I was raised with. Or those were the maternal voices. Really makes it hard to think when you suppose that to be carnally minded is death. So your meat and your mind are totally different? When what you feel-think must be totally different from what you submit-think, how are you supposed to learn-think at all, except from books of revelation?

In the case of poor souls such as myself, so eager for virtue and indoctrination, the mind/ass dynamic as taught by George Clinton ("free your mind and your ass will follow") has to be reversed: if your mind is to be free your ass must be freed first. Maybe Funkadelic sort of knew they had it wrong. Their substance of choice in 1970 while they were making that album was acid not Derrida.

I am walking along a beach on the California Central Coast. The Flesh of the Central Coast range rises steeply above me, the enormous bay on which I am a dot stretches so far to north and south that my eye cannot make sense of the scale. Just really far. Attempts to calculate the distances make my inner ear freak out, make the world seem tilt and pitch. I look down instead and find my range by the parallel lines of debris: seaweed, different colored gravel and sand, bits of shells with the occasional intact survivor, logs half-buried in sand or upended and flying plastic grocery bags from their broken limbs. The Spirit is blowing in off the Pacific. Some sort of perfect churning machine pushes waves across thousands of miles of open ocean. They hit the steep California continental shelf at about knee-height, they tuck up their feet and scoot a quarter mile across the sand and rock, breathing rafts of seaweed and discarded shells, gathering speed. And then they choose a moment, and for a second or two seconds they stand upright, and somebody sees this or else nobody does. And then some other stuff happens. But the water doesn't have much invested in this sort of question because it's not really the water that does this, anyway. What you're actually seeing is a pattern that has traveled thousands of miles, and before that the pattern came from someplace else.

I am walking along the beach and have begun to be interested in this certain kind of small and impossibly fragile purple shell. Not made for this element, hard to pick up without breaking. It's like any other gathering where you assume that you're the odd one and then you begin to notice people's uncomfortable or lopsided expressions, how much oddness there really is, and you get a little more comfortable. First I walk back and forth looking for these things, searching toward the waves and then skipping away as each exhausted breaker fans across the sand. The water draws me in, the wind pushes me away. A vast breathing that fills the entire bay, composed of a series of tiny scurrying responses to the breathing, composed of something else, composed of something even smaller and more intricate. After a bit, I begin to notice that the purple shells have been deposited about 20 yards from the receding tide, before the darker gravel, after the finest sand, sorted by density. So now I walk 20 yards from the skittering water, another parallel line, a moving and supposedly sentient and supposedly free line. To my ocean side, flat water thins to spilled marbles of foam and sinks into the sand. To my mountain side, the fog is burning off as if the sky were being raised. The wind now blows me sideways, I lean into it for balance, looking for purple shells that I can't really pick up. Without thinking about it, I know that I feel really good. For the moment, the ocean has sorted me.