Watching The Apple

 

     Last Saturday I followed a woman from the restaurant I eat in. I picked her because I found her irresistibly charming. She looked like she had just woken up and her hair was like a rat’s nest but that’s neither here nor there. You can pick anyone for any reason which is actually part of the real fun of it, along with the sense of illicit excitement. Just pick someone and follow them. It’s best to do it in a car because it gives you the feeling of being in an isolated observation post outside their world, but you can do it anyway you want. At first I had an uncomfortable feeling following her, like trespassing on private property and not getting caught. The only penalty was a kind of uneasiness,  but after a little while I just accepted it as a part of the process and it gradually changed into a kind of assignment, then into a curiosity, and then a deeper purpose, outside of the act and larger than it, began to emerge, a kind of spiritual experience as though just ‘watching’ in itself had a sacred aspect to it. 

     It was after following her a while that I began to experience a realization of the reality of  her life which resulted in a kind of oblique introspection. I began to feel for the first time what its like to be someone, to be real, to actually exist, to have a past and intention and destination. The act of watching her turned my mind back on itself with the surprising awareness that I too was real and exist and move through the world with intention and destination.

   It’s odd how you never really get the full sense of your own life being real. In a strange way it’s outside of your awareness because your inside it all the time and you can’t  really experience or appreciate the weight of its actual reality.  However after you have practiced following other people enough you can even begin to follow yourself in a kind of multiple personality trance.

     Anyway I began to develop this indescribable feeling of observing her world lifeline unfolding right in front of me, watching the book of her life like an author observing a character.  Yet it didn’t seem right somehow like I was altering some natural law, not of privacy, but of quantum possibility, by observing something without altering it. To observe another person’s  privacy and autonomy by the act of watching it was violating it,  yet there is was, still intact, despite my violation of it, just like it must be for God looking down on everyone. It felt like I had added another dimension to the universe like those ‘higher dimensions’  that the mathematicians talk about with hyperspace. It’s like matter and anti-matter being in the same place at the same time but without the destruction.

     When she stopped to pick up leaves, and a little later to look at the gabled Victorian house on the corner, I experienced an odd heightened intimacy with her that didn’t make sense. How could you feel an intimacy with someone, someone you didn’t know and who wasn’t even aware of you? It felt sort of  like 1+1/2 equaling 3 or 5. Even though there was no interaction it didn’t feel like an entirely vicarious intimacy because she was real. I thought you don’t have to eat the apple, even watching it is knowledge. I began to suspect that involvement was perhaps a shallower and deeper phenomenon than we are aware of. I remember becoming attached to a rock once that was the only other thing in a room with me.

      The farther I followed her the more a feeling of closeness grew, a curious sense of relationship, that she was no longer a complete stranger. I knew that her left leg bothered her above the ankle as she would frequently stop to rub it and that her green back pack was too heavy because she would stop now and than to take it off and set it down and that she was interested in the green dress with bright beads on it in the store window. A strangely oblique yet central satisfaction came over me. I felt a calm carefree gladness at this existence outside of mine as though I had taken a sudden 90 degree detour from the concerns of my life and was freed of its weight, like a graceful dispensation from consequences whose burden you were only partially aware of. The feeling of being closer to her kind of made sense when I thought about it. Strangers you meet can be comforting because they act as if they don’t know you whereas so often family or acquaintances act is if they do and don’t. Anyway I  became distracted by something or other and she dissappeared around a corner and I couldn’t find her. It’s amazing what surprising combinations the world has for bringing a sense of loss into it.

     But no sooner had the universe shut its door when it opened it again. I saw this old man wearing a kind of semi-formal suit with a serious determined look on his face and holding a watch in his hand like Alice’s white rabbit. Like Alice I followed him downtown in to a big office building and followed him up to the seventh floor where he disappeared behind a door labeled ‘Dr. Jeffrey Stone, Psychiatrist.’ It amazed me. I was thrilled to think that this old man was still so honestly involved in real life as to be disturbed and confused. Some things you see just bring you dangerously close to faith.