Rabbit Run

Where to begin? Traffic clogs around the toll booths, roll under and the reception gets fuzzy. Voices and beats dart in and out, a spaceman theme. Is Sun Ra here? A Romantic would say he “left the planet” 17 years ago. He said he was from Saturn; no one believed him. I want to believe him the same way I want to believe in the cruelty of ghosts, hiding in the dusty corners of coat closets and creeping along hallways with wooden floors, leaving wet footprints on the trail. After I saw Hitchcock’s Vertigo as a child, I became convinced that the image of my dead grandfather would visit me in Technicolor, causing me to bolt from the bed, sweating, just like James Stewart did when the painting of Carlotta flashed before his eyes. An expressionless face, awakened once more.

The New Atheism bores me. The reasoning is so sound, so obvious, one has to root against it, hope for angry gods, a distant rhyme, an unlikely hell.

But the Atheists are collecting their checks, and Sun Ra rots in the Alabama mud. The artifacts of his strange world clutter up museums. Toss them into a pile. The order does not matter. The laws of science are exact; the history of man is infinitely expendable.

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