Nathan says....

Autobiology

My father and mother split vitriolically when I was three.
They had a long nasty custody battle over me.
I ended up mostly with my mom and her second husband
and his three kids, who were much older than me, and
according to the terms of the judge's decision I went to
my father's apartment every other weekend and every other
Thursday afternoon. So I had an odd living situation
and felt that neither place was completely my home
and had to mentally switch gears every time I went
from one place to the other.
I always had friends, but
I spent a lot of time on my own back then too, pondering things.

Around the time I was seven and eight
I was convinced that I was the subject of
an experiment conducted by extraterrestrials
to see how I would react to various situations.
Other people were robots created to see how I would
react to them.
At one point I shared this belief with a close friend
and he said that he thought the same thing about himself.
So I figured there were at least two of us and probably more.
As late as ten I remember thinking I was being spied on.
I was sitting alone in a classroom
and thought there was a camera concealed in a clock,
and I grabbed my penis to insult whoever was looking at me.

This solipsism changed over the next years
into a belief that I and a few others
were vastly superior, intellectually,
to the rest of humanity.
In my freshman year of college
I met a poet girl who struck me as being of the same calibre
and she told me she, too, thought of most people
as being mindless sheep.
She and I were like sparks and gasoline fumes.
Deep in the night in bed with her I dreamed
two planets orbiting around each other
at an incredible rate of speed. Another night
a mountain lion and the moon.
My body has memories of these things
that it doesn't tell my mind.

The other morning, walking to work
up Hetzendorferstrasse,
I was characterizing my earlier selves
by their obsessions.
I've always been fascinated
but the fascinations shift.
If I subtract ten years from me now
I find a man who's passionate about visions
and willing to do dangerous things to achieve them
because he's confident that his death is not written into
that section of the script.
And wondering what to do with those visions
and where he'll live and how he'll earn his bread.
But if I do believe anything today
it's that we are all part of the same massive being.
I believe this because I saw it in a vision
as I lay in a hammock in the jungle:
all the humans in space and time,
I saw together, connected like the twigs and branches
of a single giant plant.

A much younger me was mad to know everything
about whales and dolphins
and dreamed of being a marine biologist
and solving the problem of interspecies communication;
though even then I thought that was a bit beyond me.
The summer I was thirteen
my mom, my stepdad, my stepbrother and I were in Maine
assisting a scientific study of whales. That is,
we'd go out in the boat most days with our friends the scientists and the
boat captain, and that summer, we saw a lot of right whales
at very close range.
I wasn't there the day the whales were mating
and one lifted the front of the boat to warn the people
to stay away.
One night the phone rang at 11PM and we raced out to some
rocky coastline because a lot of dolphins had beached themselves
and needed to be saved.
By the time we got there there was nothing to be done,
others had done it already: thrown some back in the water;
some were already dying and were taken to a building
belonging to the fishing industry and put in tanks
partly filled with water and their skins were kept moist.
I touched one of those dying dolphins. I think it was barely conscious.
Smooth and gray, firm,
and unable to explain to any of us why it had done what it had done.