Buried Alive

Very well, then — if I am an underground man, the least I can do is be frank and open about it. Seven years after writing Window Thoughts, I find myself much changed on the surface: less hair, grayer hair, a longer, grayer beard, and more wrinkles, especially on my age-spotted forehead, with a deepening crease plunging downward towards my nose past my left eyebrow. At the same time, I feel better now than I did then. Then I wore shoes. Now I wear sandals, inspired by the huaraches worn by the long-distance runners of the Copper Canyon, and, more generally, go without shoes altogether. People do on occasion look at my toes; I see them looking; I see them thinking I am not seeing them looking. My toes are not beautiful in any modern cosmetic sense, but I am willing to assume they are stronger, freer, and more mobile than the toes of the lookers, which are suffocating in their dark, moist coffins. Sometimes I can hear them calling out to me, Buried alive! But being an underground man, I say nothing about this to their owners, and scribble instead through the dark night in my journal. Of course I am not really an underground man. I am a man who simply does not buy into the current culture. I have a saying: If I can’t read it or eat it, I don’t need it. And so I collect books, and survive on a diet of nuts, seeds, and fresh greens, on fermented pickles, honey, and coarse homemade bread. About three years ago, as recorded somewhere in these pages, I ate a bright-yellow dandelion flower and found it delicious. You are what you eat. To put it simply, I would rather not be a hamburger. I would rather swallow the wind and rain and sun, and let them bounce around inside me. Am I really mad, as I said in Window Thoughts? Yes — as anyone in their right mind must be.

[ 1953 ]