This, for instance, is an honest situation. If you have a woodstove, with a chimney that a bird can fly into, and, say, fly down (this only happens in summer and fall - or at least when you're not burning wood in the stove) and then get trapped in the stove because, for some reason it doesn't think to fly back up. Then you have a kind of an honest problem. Things are at stake. More for the bird, no doubt, than for you. But let's say that you're in your study, and you start to hear noises that sound like a kind of scratching (of course you don't hear it as flapping at first, because you're not anticipating a bird flying down the chimney into your woodstove) or even whispering. The first time you think it might be a largish mouse, in the wall. This is annoying and, after waiting, hoping for it to end, which it doesn't, you stand to find the place in the wall where "the little pecker" (inadvertently you use a better metaphor) is at work, and as you home in on the sound you realize that it's coming from the stove. Then you understand pretty quickly what the problem is. You look around the room. How's this going to work, you ask? The bird will fly out when you open the stove door and fly out into the room. It will fly toward the light, not dark openings (although Lord knows how it decided that flying down an ever-darkening chimney was a good idea ... As the de-motivational poster says: "It's always darkest just before it gets pitch black." ... but perhaps birds', maybe all animals', drive to survive is a drive that's akin to the human sense of hope - that force that drives us ever onward in what can only be seen, afterward, as a dead-end.). What to do? You look around. Inspect the situation. And then take the following action: You close the door to the room. You go to the screen door to the outdoor balcony and you open it - you prop it so it stays open. You hope that it will take a few minutes for the mosquitoes and flies to notice this gaping opportunity, and then you open the woodstove door. Nothing. At first. You peer into the blackness of it and there, standing, is the traumatized (it would appear) sparrow. As you see it, it sees you, and it launches itself high to the middle of the room - toward the light. "The light!" you say, and you stride over to the switch. Even before you get there though, the bird sees the other, larger, light and flies down and easily clears the room. "Damn!" you say. "Cool!" And you close the screen door, and settle back in to your writing.
The light! I ask you then, what am I? To that bird? What am I? This is an honest question. If you ask the bird, if you could ask the bird, and then you did, and it understood your query, and could answer, what would it say? Am I a god? But then I'm an equivocating being for, inadvertently, I've built a bird trap, a kind of birdy hell-hole, from which only I can release said birdy. Am I a god? What kind of god? You see? This is an honest situation.
I propose that honest situations pose questions for which you will find no satisfactory answer. I can feel good about releasing the bird. Relieved that birdy didn't get overly confused in my room and shit all over the place. Relieved that birdy recognized the greater, better light, and flew away. But like the fish that you suspect gets caught more than once by the same hook, will birdy fly back down your chimney, anticipating the release - the release and rescue of that birdy, an action that that birdy has no chance of ever enacting himself?
Currently the cat is mewing at the door. She wants release too. Again, I'm (ie. the human in the room) the only one who can provide this for her. Of course I'm overstating it, but these are honest situations that illustrate my situation. Feeling responsible for managing a problem that I had no intention, nor much awareness, of creating. It's an honest situation.
Rode 46 ks today, to Letellier and back, and averaged 34 kph. Wind was from the West at about 7 ks.
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