July 23, 2006
House Flies (Kierkegaard had many pseudonyms)
The air felt like a solid brick, baking in a kiln. I sat still on a walk plank at the top of a stack of scaffolding. Still as the air i sat, waiting for paint to dry; literally. sweat ran down my arms to my wrists and fell like water from a leaking gutter. It fell down to where air moved in and out of the door, where the dusty floor was shaded and cool.
I waited for the wood to dry around the top edge of the tallest window. Just above my head the peak of the ceiling joined. It pointed sharp and solid like the ridge in the nave of a cathedral. There i sat like a gargoyle, silent in stone. I held the paint brush. I looked out of the window into the light.
On the glass at the very top of the window, above the dust and extension cords and power tools, flies crawled over each other, fighting for the brightest highest place on the window. they buzzed and shook and pushed their way upwards. They were trying to get outside. They all flew to the top of the cabin, directly for the biggest, brightest place, believing it was the way out; inversely, it was farthest away from the open doors below that would admit their desire. They hung there relentlessly, buzzing and pushing their way against the glass. Swings of my paintbrush would not sway them away from their convictions. In the stagnant sweltering air, they hung on, trying to reach the sky.
I pitied them; their ignorance and their buzzing. Their fighting and crawling. They were going in the wrong direction. And they would never know it. They flew to the light. To highest, brightest window they all swarmed, trying to escape their bondage. Trying to be free. I sat there. Quiet and still. I watched them. Complacent in their situation. As if, in their ignorance, they were confident in their misguided quest. They were sure it were the path to outside. I wondered how long they had been there. In horror i thought, perhaps they believed they were already free. That that smooth bright glass was their deliverance, and not the wall of their prison. That they had no idea of the comparatively infinite openness on the other side. I looked down. There were dozens dead in the window sill. I wondered if they died thinking they were on the right path. I wondered if they died believing they were already free. I realized they will stay there on the window, crawling and buzzing and shaking for the rest of their lives, and nothing would change their way.
I sat and stared at the glass, waiting for the wood to dry, and paint another coat around the windows. A gargoyle sweating in the still air.
I felt a relationship between the files and me. I had an understanding that infinity superseded their own. How simple the answer was to me. And how they will never know it. How they will push and push against that glass for rest of their short lives, waiting for their salvation; believing that the high and bright window must surely take them into the azure. I wanted them to leave. They were sticking to the wet wood. They were smashing their heads into the glass. They were buzzing in vein. I swatted them with my paint brush, trying to shoo them down. But they came immediately back, not to be shaken from their own seemingly evident attainment. I knew they would die there. I knew nothing would ever change their understanding.
I sat alone in under the rafters. Looking into the light. 20 feet below me the air in from outside moved in the open doors. I looked at the rungs on the ladders. Counted the braces in the scaffolding. I watched my sweat fall to the floor, paint dry, fingernails grow, epiphanies form. I knew their was always somewhere taller to climb. Something higher to know. And somehow, a plainer way to go.
I watched the bugs banging their heads against the window. I watched them try to get to where they so desperately wanted to go; where their blindness would never allow them be, where their gullibility may let them think they already are. They will spend their lives there, i thought, then fall into the dust, when all they ever had to do was stay down low near the dusty floor, at the bottom of everything, among the dust and the tools, where the door to their freedom was always wide open.
