Ana May's Last Supper
Chapter 2
John could not sleep. He didn't even try until early in the morning. Thoughts of time,civilization and the hunt raced through his mind repeatedly.
"Time,civilization, and patterns" were silently spoken over and over. The relationships between them were beginning to form in his mind a few hours before daylight.
John turned the light on and reached for his yellow plastic mechanical pencil and Mead yellow pad. He started writing notes; "If you deer hunt, you first learn the species."
"What does learning the species mean?"
"It means finding its habits and patterns."
"You then position yourself with an adequate weapon at one of the species most vulnerable points in its pattern."
"Could this be done with a thing called civilization?"
"There is the encounter with you,the weapon,the species' vulnerable spot in the pattern. Then what?"
"You have a choice. Or several."
"You destroy it."
"You capture it."
"You let it pass."
"As long as this is a lower species, these appear to be your basic options."
"If the species is higher than the hunter, then the hunted also has the same options to take with you."
"Has it already taken these options?"
"Has it already captured me?"
John, then knowing he had captured the significant questions so they themselves could not escape, went to sleep.
The alarm on the digital LED clock radio went off at precisely 6:06 a.m. John was amazed that with only a few hours sleep, he was so alert. The exuberance of the previous night's thoughts kept his mind humming with activity.
He fixed his breakfast, and rode his yellow ten-speed bike to the classroom a few blocks away.
As the students started coming into the classroom, he realized that he had not finished grading the papers after he encountered Neal's.
"What are we going to do today, Mr. Campbell?" He heard a voice interrupt his thoughts.
Sherri Lawson had spoken. John looked toward her and said, "Talk about time patterns."
John had spoken without thinking. He had trained his mind to talk, as well as read, on a subconscious level.
He had learned while still in undergraduate school at Eastern Kentucky University that he could easily,with very little training, talk,read, or write subconsciously and at the same time consciously observe and comprehend his visual environment.
He thought that he was turning on various parts of his brain to process information much like several mini computers feeding information to a main frame.
The conversations with the students throughout the day were not very encouraging.
Neal didn't have History today. His was a Tuesday, Thursday class.
John thought of calling Neal, but decided to wait until tomorrow. Instead, after supper, he would go to the Library and see if he could find anything about time.
He decided a poet would best be able to describe time patterns in the context that interested him.
In the ERIC Computer search he found three literary references to time. He took the elevator to the third floor and found the three books.
The first was a Hungarian poet that wrote at the turn of the century:
Time is passing, a millionth of a
second, a second, a minute, an hour, a
day. Time which you will never get
back, time that is forever gone. You
can never retreat in time, you can only
go forward. This second, this minute,
this hour is forever gone if it is
wasted, it is wasted forever, for it is
counting against your life, so many of
these seconds, minutes, hours are all
you have left and when they are over
there will be nothing.
So can you really waste your life. You
began with nothing. As these minutes
pass into days and the days into years,
you will eventually be forgotten. Your
remains will decompose into the very
atoms of which you were created, and
they will be divided among the life of
the earth, and you will be as if never
been, completely forgotten, completely
gone,nobody,nothing,absolutely nothing.
Another contemporary poet wrote about time:
I
THE MAGENTA BUTTERFLY
AND ABSOLUTE TIME
I saw a great magenta butterfly. I
recalled how I had chased butterflies
as a child. I wanted so to catch one,
to possess its beauty, if only for
awhile.
The great butterfly said follow me. I
will take you to the world of beauty.
I followed.
We entered into reds and yellows where
greens and blues once were.
The great butterfly told me we had
traveled to the other time.
He said there are two times. One
absolute and one sequential. The
sequential one is where man lives. In
man's world, each space has its own
time.
This new time, he said, is absolute and
relative only to itself. In this time
only light exists. There is no space
as we know it.
We walked on in the light, and saw many
wondrous things.
I and the great magenta butterfly saw
beauty.
John was surprised to find that one of the authors was a former Dayton College photography student named Stephen Moore. Stephen wrote about another time called "Slow Time". He wrote that, "We cannot see a bullet fly past us.
We could assume that the bullet did not exist because we could not perceive it. This is logical and easily accepted by humans. However, things could also be moving past us slowly, and we could equally assume that they did not exist, or at least live."
Stephen Moore went on to define life.
John knew Rodd Thompson, the head of the Dayton College Photography Department. "Perhaps he could ask him about Moore tomorrow,"He thought.