New Year's Snow, above inversion | A MEDITATION ON BATTERIES

A MEDITATION ON BATTERIES—a quartet

(i)

Consider this: Does an empty battery weigh less than a battery fully
charged? Or is there a difference in weight between the living human
body, and the body’s weight at death? Or consider that if we break
apart a triangle of sticks, or smash a computer, and then weigh the
resulting pile of parts, before seems to equal after in each case. But
what is lost then, if ‘it’ is evidently weightless? A pattern? A working
together, or harmony of parts?

A child might ask, “Where does the triangle go?” Does it at the mo-
ment of break-up just cease to exist, like after switching off the lights,
colors cease to exist in a darkened room? Or is it more like a handful
of brightly colored sand thrown at random on the skin of a large bass
drum turned on its side, brought into resonant movement by a singing
voice, or trumpet, or trombone? After all, instantly, there is here pat-
tern. Instantly, new figures of extraordinary complexity emerge with
each new change of pitch. (If you actually see this first-hand, you’ll
never forget it.) But once the sound stops, the structure quickly loses
its integrity. You can weigh the sand, before and after, but again it will
show no difference. So again, to our current way of seeing and mea-
suring and thinking, before equals after. That is, except for a loss of
resonance. A loss of resonance? A mere weightless nothing? Or just
perhaps, very much closer to, everything.

(ii)

Imagine that we decide on a whim that we shall from this day forward
collect all the dead batteries of the world and dump them at one conve-
nient central location, say, for instance, your house. (You do use bat-
teries, don’t you?) I don’t mean the big car-battery kind; Just the small
ones, like the ones used in flashlights. Think of it. Before the end of the
day, there would be a veritable Matterhorn in your front yard, a toxic
mountain of the used-up and unwanted.

As the pile grows, however, you might cleverly initiate an action via the
world-wide web. You decide, and encourage others to follow your lead,
that instead of sending the dead batteries to your house, we’ll all join in
together and send them to his house, the White House. This would not
only be saying Yes We Can both to Civil Disobedience in the spirit of
Amos Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau, but also to an utter-
ly—when it comes to doing anything fundamental about eliminating not
just waste, but the very idea of waste itself— deadbeat Washington.
Keep the packages coming! From around the Nation. No! From around
the world. Now that would be change!

[Note: In a time of systemic political paranoia, it may be worth
mentioning that the above miniature is meant as satire.]

(iii)

Behind the light that every flashlight gives is a dark story. We want to
know nothing about it. It is a story of suffering, of children forced to
work in the mines of Africa and South America. It is the story of Cad-
mium. Of Zinc, Of Lead. All leaching unchecked as we speak at our
leisure, you and I, into the great and vast surface waters of the living
Earth, and into the mother’s milk of the still unborn. The story says:
You there, brother; You there, sister. What a sad way to discover that
the world is round!

(iv)

Some things we can evidently know only by demonstration. Visual
inspection will not reveal to us which batteries are ‘alive,’ and which
batteries are ‘dead.’ Just as mere cursory auditory inspection will not
reveal to us which performer of a Bach solo sonata brings the music
truly to life. They may play exactly the same notes, in the same order,
in the same approximate measure and tempo. Yet, when magically the
inner energy or spirit of the music comes alive, begins to breathe like a
natural singing voice, we too begin to move or resonate with it sympa-
thetically. Like Aristotle said of the gift of metaphor in poetry, this is
perhaps the one thing in music that cannot be taught. But how do you
know when this very subtle inner something is there? Be simple.
When the ‘lights’ come on!