The odd thing I noticed was that the first time I’d had a vision of the black toy wagon, my feet were positioned roughly as they are now — when I have just had the second “vision” of it.
When I had my first vision
I was stepping back and forth on the plush carpet, left foot forward, right foot forward, left foot back, right foot back, like this repeatedly. In a meditative mindset, I was conscious of the give of the mesh of the carpet fiber beneath my feet, which I felt was greater than the yield or give that my knee was giving to my thigh (that is, the carpet gave way before my feet far more nicely and gently than my knee gave way before my thigh) — and greater, too, than the yield or give that my foot gave to my ankle (my foot did not yield to my ankle nearly as gently as the carpet did before my foot). The ankle was like an equals sign, I distinctly remember having thought then, whose equation was all the weight of the body above it, added each to each, a kidney weighing this, a blood cell weighing this, the partially digested meal I had eaten and the song in my head also to be counted, weighed, divided by two; whose answer was the foot, or whose answer was on the foot; something like this– the foot was X and the solution for X was what was on the foot, and the ankle was like the equals sign. (And I, clenching my fists near my chest, raising my head as if screaming to the ceiling, was “the sum” — and that silent scream too was added to the x.)
Comparing, in other words, the give between myself and the floor (by which I mean the give between my feet and the floor but which for some reason denotes for me personally the “give” between my foot and head, my body indeed being defined as that very feeling of “give” that exists between the feet and head) and between various parts of myself and various other parts of myself, one revelation was (having suddenly realized that my head, my seemingly weightless head, was itself a physical presence that must weigh something and must rest on something, namely, the leg to which all the rest of my body was merely an ankle, so to speak; the head was not merely some sort of floating thought); one revelation of making these comparisons was that the “neck” wasn’t really its own separate anatomical part, but only looked like something separate, only looked as if it were its own part, and was actually just the upper end of the spine, a joint was what it was really, an elbow, an ankle… having revelations of this kind as I stepped back and forth on the carpet, making, by the way, very small steps (as you might step onto a scale to weigh yourself, for example, without, however, there being any elevation — stepping on and off this scale that was perfectly level with the floor, was how I moved), when I was suddenly overcome with the powerful flooding sense that while there was or could be “nothing I could understand of the world beyond what I could understand of myself” yet the “Myself” that was stretched around me, both “fleshily as the flesh” and mentally as the “static field of the flesh” (was the parlance I used) was fake and uninteresting; was trying and failing to be real and to get my attention; and I stepped forward into it and stepped backward into it, this falseness, a false feeling of life, and did this again and again, because, as they say, you have to do something with your life (and that was the general character of the mood I was in, that you have to do something with your life) and because maybe what I was doing was a little like something and because maybe with one of these steps I would step into my real self, the self that really felt like myself, that I would step into a life that was real; for these reasons or something very much like them, then, this is what I was doing when there first appeared to me the vision of the black toy wagon.
Now, however, on the second occasion of me having this vision, though I am, as in the first instance, looking down to my feet, there are several key differences: my feet are, first of all, stationary; they are, secondly, matched up evenly, toe to toe and heel to heel; and they are thirdly (and I wish also to say most importantly) lying flat upon the grass of a nearby grassy lot and not upon the plush fibers of my own dwelling’s carpet. Situated thus, I have had that “vision” again which hardly seems so important now, but for this, that it is now two times that I have had this same vision: a vision of a toy wagon painted entirely black and in appearance wholly sinister, which I doubted very much could be the toy of any human child. Small like a child’s toy but sinister like the toy of no person. If I were to ever have a third vision of it I would start to get seriously concerned, was how sinister it seemed to me — but I never did.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 