Chapter 19, episode 11, and a little bit of mysterious exegesis.

Copyright © 2010 Ernest Bloom.

The sky was lead-colored around the sun, riding high overhead, mounting higher and higher. They were tracking across the packed wet sand with only the women's footprints to guide them. All traces of passages get washed away through the cycles of tides and waves, he thought. Oscillators and simple harmonic motion. It was that way: a long period of resisting entropy, resisting, and then the great surgical slice down through time, and surrender, no more resisting at all. All that high drama and fury, the sound, the banshee noise of it all, voices, bodies clashing, bodies colliding, the surge and the ebb, the wailing tempest roar. The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword. How wild this Atlantic beach might be in winter, he thought. He imagined pirates rowing ashore here on a much colder day than this one with the wild seas tossed high in advance of a coming squall. To bury treasure? Surely. Blackbeard, maybe, milky onyx eyes and a pirate's coat of indigo blue. Had Blackbeard not operated up north, off the Carolinas? But any brigands at all might have secretly dispatched a lonesome scow ashore here under low, violent storms, red lightning licking closely overhead. There must be, he thought, an instinct to bury treasure away, just as squirrels sequester acorns and dogs bury bones. The hording instinct. Money under the mattress. Greed cowering behind a patriotic mask. Fear slinking in the darkest shadows. Secret it away.


But he considered how attempts to amass secret treasure hordes inevitably prove futile. Old, fraying paper money is confiscated piecemeal and impounded by the banks and destroyed, making way for the future, for the new. Flax. Security devices and strips. Watermarks. Even our most cherished material possessions decay and fall apart. Moths devour prized fabrics. The bothersome moth doth wage wroth upon the tender cloth. And rust never sleeps.


Caveat emptor. Some see how things are, some see how things could be much worse. The clashing half-a-glass views of social intercourse. Conflict. Irresolvable differences. But conflicts breed a symbiotic interdependence. An ecological necessity. Codependence, love to hate, hate to love. Capitalism is a formalized ritual of state-sanctioned thievery, but let authority endorse it as official policy and all public doubt and compunction melts away. Those were merely the rules of the game. The rules of the road. Morality only clouds simple matters, like pouring milk into a glass of dark, bubbly cola. Some few mystics or visionaries or other hallucinating fools consider how things could be, imagine other worlds. What mass-psychology would prevail were the old laws cast away and new ones rewritten, like. . . .let the seller beware. Rock the gestalt and risk rousing the sleeping giant up through a series of rough, overlapping dreams? Shift the burden to the plutocracy and the cause of common decency. Make humanity safe for human beings. What a maverick concept! Positively unredeemable recusant. Threat to the herd.


Conventional thinking thus reflexively lays waste the tender iconoclast.


Ahead were many bathers on the beach, men, women, children. Children digging in the mud, raising destitute, forlorn, crumbly castles, water seeping up to fill the moats. Those foundations cannot be at all sound. Facing eviction, all of them. Teetering on the brink, perhaps unwittingly. The invisible threat of foreclosure. Goliath bankers. The economy was to blame, he thought, torn apart by an out-of-sight-out-of-mind departed administration, so blame it all on the black guy, an easy and convenient scapegoat that obviates any necessity for considering reality. Tinny music squeaked out from the wharf on shore, synthetic pop music. A never-ending barrage of breeding songs. Songs written and composed exclusively as a cheap soundtrack for enacting mating rituals. The men flexed, strode firmly, toned and cocky. Brown and muscular, mused hair, gleaming white smiles and black shades like a hundred Jack Kennedys after the steroid injections. Baseball caps. Plenty of young women on display out here in the warm sun in their bikinis, flirty objects at play, and everyone pretending it was not indistinguishable from a public parade in one's underwear, or less. It was only a matter of the context, not the flesh exposed-to-concealed ratio per se. He longed suddenly to see Nora that way, but she walked along up ahead with Jessie, the two of them still talking seemingly quite earnestly now, Nora still poking her stick into the strand, carrying her shoes in her other hand, her feet bare in the soft sand, only the backs of her naked knees visible to him beneath the buttoned cuffs of her long shorts. The calves of her long, brown legs, and her blonde hair hanging down over her breezy-light blue denim shirt. Charlie was nowhere to be seen, but Teddy walked alongside him, a few feet continental, brooding on his own thoughts behind a gloomy, saturnine mien. He wondered what sort of thoughts enveloped Teddy. Probably thinking about sports, he guessed. Missed games.


Well, that was fate, too. The needs of the trip imposed those limits on what Teddy could and could not do. Curtailed his decisions. You gave up one set of options for another.


Tradeoffs were central to nature. That was the cardinal dynamic. Confined by limiting factors and tolerance boundaries, species must commit absolutely to choices that could not be undone. A genetic tactics thus unfolded, and it revealed itself to those who had eyes to see. But only, he reflected, if a decent window-washer could be found to scrub away these filthy panes which darken our cavernous interiors! Why did soaring condors sacrifice bone density for greater wingspan? Or conifers grow needles and river-weed cottonwoods sprout great splayed, flat, sticky leaves? The questions and answers were one: reproductive success maximized under divergent environmental and ecological milieux. Leaf morphologic optimization correlated with photosynthetic efficiency. Aridity. Availability of water. Presence of shade. Heat. Minimizing profligate transpiration. Ecology and economics are one. The calculus of n-dimensional multifactor optimization: maximize a while minimizing b. Maybe the same logic leads inevitably to a critical polarization of a binary politics? We must entertain even the least savory hypotheses. . . .Confronting vying masters, the mind cleaves to the one or the other. Materialism. Greed. Lust for money and power. Ostentatious charity. Ostentatious prayer. Avarice. Richness. Injustice. Covetousness.


No.


It were better by far to secretly bury your spiritual treasures away in Heaven like a good, pious pirate should.