The Paradise Unsoiled

There is a foetus in a jar in the bio lab of my school. Students come and go and dust settles and glistens and is blown away from his glass case in golden puffs but he doesn't move. He shares space on a shelf with other non-fussy and brooding specimens of the living world, so I am not afraid that he will be lonely. In fact, something tells me he would have grown to have changed the world. Something always tells me that. Maybe it is the amount of time he has spent in that lab, which is longer than any of us.

Does he have any fears? The catfish looks threatening but his eyes are closed, whether in nap or in meditation, it is hard to tell with the Shinto devout. The chameleon looks friendly and a little silly even. He seems to get along well with the catfish,his whiskers like tell-tail smoke of  last night's conversation. The frog is,well,dissected and looks accusingly at you. And all the other animals have too many legs to bother with this little person. Or with the students who come and go. The human skeleton is harmless, he's plaster cast and has no life. The foetus cannot fear drowning, there is nothing else he has known, before or after the jar. He cannot fear dark. He cannot afford to fear prying eyes and gaping mouths. But his head and his body is bent inward in the shyness of his translucent, revealing self.

Or he is self-absorbed in the act of learning all that he must know before he steps into the bright, loud, white and yellow scrambled egg din of  a life, before he paused in unripe confusion. To follow the simple command that ebbs from himself to grow into a unique self with amazing clarity and understanding of the human  design, with little regard to mis-form and mal-function. For that is for the people who look at him to question and mock. As if a mis-form of his body matters, as if the act of having created himself is a lesser wonder.

His arms,slender, breakable chopsticks,end in determined little fists. His fists and all the little crooks of his body that like all foetuses bend, to slowly sketch the lines on our palms, behind our knees, around our neck,encircling our toes for a period of nine months, that stay engraved for the rest of our lives. To sketch the lines that some say, spell our fate. The foetus knows what to sketch. Perhaps we are born wiser than we think, it is fascinating how quickly we lose our senses in the world. But this foetus is 5 months unborn, taut and no lines. I think that's what it is, not fear or shyness, but the weight of his wisdom that bends him into himself as if curling into a benzene ring.
From and of and back to the hydrocarbons that make our essential self, beneath all that we possess. From and of and back to, except the pickle solution that keeps him from going back. So he can be looked at with the questioning eyes that hover on his indifferent little self, unwilling to spill a single secret.

Thank you for keeping me company and keeping the secrets of all who sat by you in wonder of you to forget for five minutes how simple and complex life and school and what-after-school and such can be. I'll come by and visit soon, if that's ok with you. Just five minutes or so of your time and then you can proceed with your unending introspection and bemusement at all who come and go.