Feeling like a Man Again by Anna Tambour

 

It's one of those days again (you might have them, too) when I feel like a man again. An uncircumcised man whose foreskin has just been pulled back for the first time in a special way, and who is feeling that legendary feeling. And it is almost too great to bear. At least that's how the story of the feeling goes, so I imagine it so, not having a foreskin, and not being a man.

A couple of days ago at the beach I picked up a barnacle, a hoary thing about the size and weight of an apricot, but damask-rose red. This barnacle had been almost covered on the outside by two types of coral, both white. One looks to the naked eye like fine foam, and the other, like a honeycomb tripe, each cell the size you would make by poking something with the tip of a fine embroidery needle. On the underside of the solid base of this handful of a barnacle, another tiny barnacle had grown, this one so small I didn't see it at first. Think of the size of a piece of peanut between your teeth. I imagine that the one had been taken over by the other; I can't pretend to really know the plot. But it was the sound of the big barnacle that surprised me. It rattled.

With a torch and straining eyes, I saw. Like that ship in a bottle, this barnacle contains inside its cavity, something many times larger than its opening. In this case, a rock oyster who had picked the wrong place when it was a couple of weeks old and still microscopic, to make its home. I don't know its story, either, but I imagine it goes something like this: While the barnacle was feeding, the oyster slipped in and lodged somehow between the flesh of the barnacle and its shell. Rock oysters' shells conform to the shape of the rocks they land on and live on, all their lives. And so did this, till eventually, it was choked. Considering that the oyster's shell is quite thick, and almost the diameter of the inside base of the barnacle, they had a close relationship for some time, though what is time to an oyster or a barnacle?

Yesterday in the forest, while whining over how to get over a log in a way that doesn't take too much time (I am a clumsy walker), I happened to look where I never had before, at a place just by where I have swung my boot countless times.

Imagine a fine rubber band. One of those that come on something you buy—but you can't think of a use for this rubber band, it is so trivially thin. So you throw it in the back of a desk drawer where over the years, it congeals with others, till one day you clean the drawer. Imagine not tossing them in a drawer, but having a collection of them that you cut into neat pinkie-finger-nail lengths. And one day you come upon them to find that the rubber bands have centres that are alive, and that those centres have grown. That is the only way I can describe what was on that log, for I can't even find a picture of it yet. It was, of course, a type of fungi, looking like it was inserted in the log by a hair-implant specialist. Attached to the log were perhaps 400 individual black hairs, spaced apart just as far as hair implants are, and along the shaft of each hair about three millimetres up, the rubber-band coating began. These stood as perpendicularly as they could from the log, but since they had the same texture and wobbliness as rubber bands, they ended up clumped into groups and sort of congealing with each other in that forgotten-rubber band way. The clumps did have a kind of design to them. They looked like a rather closely packed arrangement of Central American flat-topped pyramids, these fungi pyramids being four-sided.

And an hour ago, after peering into that barnacle, I opened up a rather huge book on the sea to see if I could find something that described oysters, and hit the very page. I reached out to my windowsill where I have a saucer-size flat rock oyster; crushed a couple of minute bugs on its top, and turned it over. On the almost flat surface, a spider froze. Size? Body, a 24 pt full stop (or period—take your pick of term). Transparent legs. Her tiny web was near her, strung between two buttes on the shell, each the height of, say, a scab on your knee. I needed a loupe to view her, and when I looked, I saw that she was guarding her egg sack, an eye-straining 6 pt, finer than a noticeable grain of sand.

There's more, about different sights, like the eagle, or the water beetle but I can't go on. I'm too full.

You can think, oh yeah, but we don't have that stuff where I live. But that makes me remember that my cat taught me that grass—ordinary lawn grass—has hair. And different types of grass has different types of hair.

And you can think, quite rightly, what a cheap trick, that stuff about the foreskin. I should have said heart. My heart is full, yadda yadda yadda. And where's the remote control? What's on now?

Did I say that I begin the day, every day, with 'the news'? It almost today, almost made me incapable. Incapable of anything you care to imagine. I'll call it feeling, the kind of feeling that we need to be able to assess and think and change the world—the world that we can change.

I am mostly unfeeling, mostly walking around not seeing the grass, let alone the hairs on it. We are all mostly doing that, and as displacement, watching 'reality', wanting to crawl into the shells of celebrities and form a special relationship. Shoving all nature into a strait-jacket of 'morality', though nature itself, from the worm making a snail's tender body pulse, to viruses that jump species opportunistically, defies any definition of morality, as our own species does, god vs god, all gods and their 'good' as hypocritical,  and ridiculously and dangerously irrelevant, as nature (and ourselves, as part of it) boxed by Lysenko.

I do have that full feeling now, call it what you will. It makes me, as that legendary cliché goes: feel alive, but more than that. It makes me remember what life is.