SONG OF THE DAY: Quiet Village

I have for a while maintained relations with the elves that inhabit Seven Islands in the river known as James post-colonialism, but earlier this spring in chatting with their sentry and my friend Chubbrock, he informed me of other bands of these elven river people along other outposts of the James, as well as the Rivanna and Appomattox rivers. He sent communication to a friend of his at one of their outposts not far from Texas Beach in Richmond earlier this year, to establish a meeting which happened a month or so back – a friend vouching for friend, because it is hard even in my rural area for these endangered elven people to trust human contact in their quiet villages, but even more so in a heavily populated area with a publicly accessible beach frequented by so many, who – despite their self-identification as progressive and caring – endanger non-human existences simply with their presence.

Anyways, I met this other elven person last month, and I’m not sure it went well as I don’t think they trusted me at all. Sometimes in situations where one person vouches for another, it what we hope would work to increase the trust between Person A and Person C connected by Person B, it only works to weaken the faith in that Person B. This may have happened for Chubbrock, but I applied my learned practices of sitting there, shutting the fuck up, and listening. Strangely, I had been listening to something on the Richmond NPR station while driving into the river area to meet this elven dude about divisiveness in current American culture. I say “strangely” because basically all this elven dude did was tell me a story.

He said that at one point, on what we call Belle Isle now, there was a giant tree, back before men had settled there, which reached a thousand clouds high. This tree’s roots touched all areas within the wandering foot’s imagination beneath the ground. But men came along, and were unable to see trees as culmination of existence. Men felt the compulsion to reshape existence of all things, so the tree was cut down and sliced into segments. “The same thinking is why you have machines, which are supposed to make work easier according to your human ways, but actually disconnect you from the work, and somehow leave you feeling lost.” He had a wispy elven beard but there was a tiny bald patch with a scar on his left cheek. I noticed he rubbed at the spot a couple times while he was talking. Not sure if that’s important or not, but I noticed it.

The thing was, he continued, our thinking eventually decided even having segments of trees separated as they were was not enough, so the men begin splitting the segments further down, using wedges. “These wedges were not physical, not steel, but made of strange mechanical codes,” he explained. And all the segments from the giant tree were fractured down into smaller splinters, in what humans thought were more useful. “And you swollen people” (lol that’s what he called humans sometimes, derogatorily almost, “swollen people”)… “you realized the giant tree was destroyed but you couldn’t put it together again. So you just stood around yelling at each other that you had to put the giant tree back together, mad at each other for not putting the pieces back in place right, taking turns but it all just falling apart, because you never could seem to understand that you just had to let a new tree grow, and that there were already many trees, as there are here now around us, that are half a cloud high already, and nothing can speed up or perfect existence other than accepting it as it already exists.”

I was thinking in my head about the NPR talk radio thing, and how the weird code mauls he was speaking of were maybe algorithms? But that was also me projecting, as humans do, and I caught him rubbing his bare spot on this beard and looking at me with concern. “How long have you known Chubbrock?” he asked, and it wasn’t very long after that he found reason to leave me without plans of entertaining another visit. Can’t blame him to be honest; I’m too human to be trusted.