Dream Dream Dream

Construction is best described by comparing it to what aborigines do when in need of shelter.

In the pre-modern world one simply built their house.  They built it, and the rain responded with a different path than through their hair, body and heat (and the entropic impossibility that that represents to the indifferent natural world.  Life vs. physics, a blockbuster with a very bad plot. As Robert Boyer would say, it would have been nice if both of the teams had arrived. And played a real game.)  

In the modern world we build.  And then they come.  To fix it and coax it alive to the imagination that created it and dreams it.  But the dream cannot be, in the real world, one that fits the scale of even one puny human life.  By the halfway point of my life expectancy our dreams of wood, will rot or be eaten.  And so our monuments to forever, will be unseen, and forgotten by the human imagination.  Inappropriate to the needs of even one life.

Enter the construction worker.  He looks, with the aid of the homeowners perspective.  And it is his choice by what lights he illuminates the path of the rain.  Should that self same rain not run through the hair of his client already, then a good deal of negotiation (read psychology, honesty, spirituality, and appraisal of needs for self and civic responsibility.)  should ensue, that in the best of all possible worlds would lead to a compromise.

Or disappointment.  To the customer.   Who wishes to hear that what goes up, shall remain there like the deep seated wishes of the ancients.  Sometimes for a thousand years.

You try telling them that the compromise, inherent in this process, is as enduring as any granite stone.  They will call you a poet.  And call a ready construction worker (promise maker) for the promises such a call should intimate.  In our world.  

Have fun.

Truth is that it is fun being a vulture.  The customer says that the side of their beloved garden shed has gone soft.  

You say, My Goodness, you are correct and I shall rid you of this chronologic of public and private scorn.  

You have lived among the rotten, but I will deliver new wood.  

Between you not a word is spoken as to the deliverer of the news that has reached you (the construction worker) of their predicament.  

They think it a possibly slothful response to siege.  You are only too glad to smile at the cruelty of life.  For you have awaited this passage of time as surely as they have dreaded it.

The evolutionary blah, blah, blahs are very happy.  Look how we work together in symbiosis.  Seemingly unaware agents of each others progress toward the common dream of... what?

These fools toil in the discipline that is their circumstance, knowing little of friendship and love.  An invisible hand, somehow a permanent fixture in the world they love more:  of mountains, stone, and trickling creeks that speak nothing in argument. 

Anyone can fly in the arms of Superman, to a crystal place of indifference.  Can make a case for the strange shrinking need of a people who before the sudden altitude of three thousand feet seemed as large as life.

How strange the woman, however, or man, who stops the great glass elevator to ask:  my God, man, how are you?  My God what can I do?

For some of us this response is a perversion of the path to our dreams.  And for others, I know not how many, the only manner by which they might ever have met a happiness.