The Break

In the last five days Zoogle has changed from Marlon Brando into Dorian Gray. His endless rolls of tummy chub have evolved from undulating hills into a luxuriant sloping tundra, i.e. the coherent, well-proportioned pot-belly that is the trademark of any man in serious pursuit of sustained overindulgence. His face, which was once a pear (photo left), has become a heart (photo right), with high, ruddy cheeks and bright eyes reflecting a spirit that has sampled, and is confident in its ability to continue to sample, the fruits of Life's basic abundance. And his hair, once wispy and fine, is now a coarse, tangled mass of snaggle-heaps, little fibrous thickets that shoot up irregularly across the scalp; in short, the hair of a man who is losing his hair, and is sufficiently rich in Life's graces that he doesn't give a damn.

Like many of the slow changes that we never notice (the ebbing of a water line, the death of a relationship) I imagine that the transformation did not, in fact, occur within the last five days, but has been happening for a long time, finally becoming substantial enough that we took note. Of course, the trigger for such sudden recognition could be a shift in reality, or it could be a shift in perception: in this case, there are a couple of reasons our perceptual apparatus might be more open than usual. On my end, the semester just ended (modulo final exams), and as usual, there is a concomitant rush of energy, a simmering, excited lull in which I hash plans, connive, dream, and unfold. The world seen through the filter of Another Beginning is very different from the world seen through the filter of Another Day at the Grind. The end of the semester also means that those among Catalina's fellow graduate students who were not hijacked by a baby are now applying for jobs, a potent reminder that, if the five year plan is to hold, she has only 12 more months in which to finish planning, reading for, and writing her thesis. When the life of the mind must be seized in small snippets, summing up to no more that two or three hours of good, focused time per day, the organism reasonably responds by employing its sensory minions more efficiently.

Of course fate gives with the left hand and takes with the right: in what should have been a grand week of explosive advance, I was struck with a violent stomach flu, Zoogle has been cranky and irritable, and Catalina has been reeling under the responsibility of simultaneously caring for an infant and invalid. So while both our eyes were open enough to see that Zoogle is changing, the wife is currently roaming the house like a Zombie, I am prostrate in bed with brain fever, chills, and serial vomiting, and Zoogle, mercifully flu-free but cranky as hell (teething?) continues to lord our home and actions like Max WildThing.

In a curious sense, however, it almost seems to me that the Perception Broadening properties of a good Breaking Open are identical to those of a Breaking Down. It is exactly in these selve oscure, when the body and the spirit have given all that you thought that they could give, that you discover yet another streak of energy, yet another glimmering of willpower that allows you to drag your broken, feverish body from the bed at 7 in the morning, to feed the cats, to tend the child, to ruminate on a set of measure zero, or to behold with bleary, ecstatic eyes the wonders of the natural world.