What Are Your Feet Doing?

     I watched a black ant walking across the floor last night.  He seemed out of place, searching for food in the wrong location.  He must've entered the house on a foraging trip and gotten distracted inside, wandering around, seeking sustenance for the good of his community--some nearby underground city run by a female leader.  I didn't kill the ant.  I put a postcard I found at hand by the ant and coaxed him onto it.  I carried the card to the front door, turning it this way and that to keep him on board, opened the door and blew him away into the night.  I marvel at the lightness of an animal that can fall the human equivalent of many hundreds of feet to a hard surface and resume walking as if nothing happened.
     These beings needn't deal with gravity as we must.  "Watch your step," we hear throughout our lives.  Walking down stairs can sometimes turn suddenly into a fast tumble, with pain.  Bewilderment too, as one tries to understand how it happened.
     In February 2015, Madonna, while performing, fell offstage.  Three months later, The Edge, the taciturn-looking guitar-playing fellow in U2, fell offstage.  It's bad enough to fall in private, but to do it in front of thousands of people turns the failure of balance into an EVENT.  News organizations show video of the incident, people who weren't there make comments.  Questions like, "Is Madonna getting too old to perform live?" get asked by pricks who have no musical talent themselves.  Quips are made: "The Edge got too close to the edge."  It's like a newsman saying, "Obama bombed yet another country, and meanwhile, pack animals in Pakistan are still used as transporters of significant amounts of arms to the Taliban, which is still banned by the government in Kabul, and that's no bull."
     Tonight I find myself coming down from a light drunk, feeling somewhat at loose ends, and silly, even slightly brain dead.  I'm listening to something put together by someone for YouTube, "Sci-Fi-Lo-Fi: Shoegazing 1985 - 2007"  It consists of so-called shoegaze songs.  The term derives, apparently, from how 1980s and early 1990s bands like My Bloody Valentine, Lush, Ride, Pale Saints, and many others, would use lots of pedal effects on their guitars, thus keeping their eyes on their feet while they played.  It's a generalized term, but it sounds all right as a piece of English: Shoe gazing, gaze at your shoes, which recalls the famous William S. Burroughs anecdote about how he once stared at his foot, with his shoe on, all day during his heroin-using days.  As he put it, looking at the foot with the shoe on was much more interesting than it would've been had it been his naked foot.  Why this might be is a matter of conjecture, but I take his word for it.
     The death of Prince, like the death of David Bowie last January, reminds me that so many great musical people are dying off, while some have been lost for a long time.  I was shocked when John Bonham, Led Zeppelin's drummer, died.  He was thirty-two.  I was about sixteen at the time, Led Zeppelin was my favorite band then.  The thought of it made me feel a kind of non-physical illness, a drifting inside as if the line to a vital anchor had broken.  Other musical deaths that bothered me were those of John Lennon, Freddy Mercury, Lou Reed, Kurt Cobain, and Lush's Chris Acland.
     One death persistently haunting me is that of Jim Morrison on July 3, 1971, in Paris.  I know he was in a bathtub; in cooling water, no doubt.  There's an ancient Roman quality to his death.  He didn't commit suicide, but a typical Roman way of suicide for the privileged classes was to slit one's forearms open and bleed out in a hot bath, the water's warmth helping to ease the suicide into the line waiting to board Charon's boat.
     Our minds hold thoughts like movie images recalled and repeated; Vader, for instance, confronting Luke Skywalker with the truth of his origin after slicing off Luke's hand in The Empire Strikes Back;  Ingrid Bergman's mouth, her wet eyes at the end of Casablanca as she's told by Bogart to leave town, there's no future for them, only the past.  I could've mentioned far lesser known films, but used two images lots of people know.  Still, I'll write about an image coming to mind from Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire.  It's a shot that means very little in the overall scheme of the movie, but it's haunting: hundreds of birds flying over the two Berlins (pre-wall coming down), moving in unison, as starlings do.  They resemble a thumbprint at one point, nature's identity pressed on the sky, which, in spite of its opaque colors, is always a way to the infinity of space.
     The ant found the chemical ways back to his city, exchanged information using his antennae with others too busy to have missed him.  No starlight or illumination of any kind in the tunnels, not needed or thought about.  Images recalled and repeated.  Wind in the grass, sunshine through tree branches making light flashes in the ant's path.  No need to know what the light is.  It's just there, like a thought while someone sits in a tub.

                                                                             Vic Neptune