Is the beast beauty?

The memory of a scorpion bite maintains a tenacious clarity.  It is a wood tick on the mind.  But recalling a beautiful vista is akin to pinning a fog's wisp to a bulletin board.  

Some months ago I stood near the window of my bed, dresser, and no chair sized apartment in San Andres, Guatemala, and tried to burn such a vista into my memory's folds.  With the aid of the window, itself framed by lemon yellow walls, I wrapped the banana’s leathery leaves, the citrus tree, the sky, the high hill falling away down the pueblos steep streets to Lago Peten Itza's shore, and the smooth slate of the lake with the wake of a boat fanning out like a feather's veins into memory.  Each of these things I caressed with my eyes, one by one, and lay them into my mind as a whole and then, again, repeated the process as if I were an athlete and the scene in the window were a baseball blazing toward me at ninety miles an hour.  

I became one with the scene.  Then, I turned my back.  And I walked out the door, closed it with that frayed twine latchstring, and forgot.    

Now, months later, I can recount to you that the sky was blue and the lake was blue and the boat's wake was blue, too.  I can also tell you, because I know this from life, that no two blues are the same and that those three blues in that window frame filled me and spread through my veins like warm blood and were one with me.  Each of them was the same and each of them was different and I no longer recall how it was that they were.  And I am dumb with loss for it.  

I do remember that I walked out the door and over to Berthilda, she was cooking by the blackened outdoor stove, and I hugged her.  I remember the electricity of her pleased surprise in my hug.  I remember that Greysi and Gabriel were awake but Lucas slept.  I said good-bye to the 

first two and walked down the stony hill afraid, as always, that I would slip and fall, to the lakeshore and the waiting water taxi.

It is eight o'clock at night when I reach the locked black wrought iron gates of the Hotel Mar Caribe in Playa del Carmen.  I've traveled 14 hours, am tired, am disoriented, and do ring the bell of the door.  Marta sticks her head out a second floor window.

"Do you have a room," I slur.  In Spanish.

Thanks Wikipedia

She does.  She unlocks the gate with a clank, leads me up the dark stairs, and opens the door to a bright clean room with large white floor tiles.  I'll remember the tiles.  The now dead scorpion and my neurology will  that I do.

The scorpion, I believe now, had journeyed with me from my apartment on San Andres' hill to Marta's welcoming white room.  Already that day, like me, it had endured much in patience.  I don't imagine it minded, much, being zipped up amongst my clothes in my pack.  It must have minded, more than I, the Mexican soldier who so thoroughly pawed my laundry, clean and soiled, in search of contraband.  When I recall the scorpion now I think of the color and location of the soldier's rifle muzzle: flat black and inches from my face, as he probed blindly just centimeters from the hidden venom.

Marta left and I switched on the fan and slumped in a travel stupor, on the bed's edge, for a brief respite.  Then, unzipping my pack,  I removed my toiletries, a towel, a book.  I showered.  I read. I slept. The scorpion remained in my open pack sleeping, if scorpions do, beside me.

By morning my mind is cleansed.  I am ready, again, for the road.  To start with I'll treat myself to clean clothes; socks, underwear, shirt, and I'll wear my black pants.  Digging these out of the pack, I pull them on, stand to zip and button them, and sit back on the bed.  In satisfaction I put my hands on my knees.  My wrists are where you'd expect them to be but I must show you: They are just above my hands.  On my thighs.  Just above my knees.  I can sense my right wrist there now. I can see the weave of the fabric's fibers in my black pants.

Why is there a pin in my pant leg?  Why such a fiery quality to its prick?  These are the questions I pose as I raise my right hand to observe the pin which starts to move under my wrist and then takes the form of a scorpion, a creature I've only seen twice before.  The form, solidifying in my mind, shares the color of my pants.  But shellacked.  The blackness of my pant leg gains two, then three, dimensions.  Moves.  A pause, then Scorpion!! surges through my synapses.   Huge!  I wildly brush.  Once.  Time.  Freezes.  Twice.  I'm rising.  From the bed.  Three times.  Standing now.  

The scorpion, as shiny black as the floor tile's white, in panic races toward my pack's refuge.  No.  You don't!  I pick up the pack.  Heave it atop a chair.  Scorpion about faces.  Heads toward my boots.  My cosmos is: A scorpion as black as the tropical night, floor tiles as bright as a mid-day Caribbean beach, and an upended and weathered brown boot.  

Smack.

The scorpion does not leave life easily.  His is a strong spirit.  He battles death.  But his insides too, smeared now on the bright tiles, are as dark as the space between the stars.

At the time I did, with heart galloping, regret the scorpion's death throes smeared there in its chitinous agony.  I did marvel at its tragic intelligence at choosing, as its last refuge, the absolute camouflage of black on black.  And I did regret forcing its hand after it had so assiduously avoided stinging both the Mexican soldier and I as we bungled through its pack.  But now, from the safety of times distance, I have assimilated some of this and I know a little of what caused the Ancestors to place this amazing creature among the constellations.  

Now, in my searing adrenalized state, these thoughts flash by at a speed and clarity to turn advanced microchip designers green.  

My principle preoccupation is my own physical integrity.  My first thought is to lie down.  To calm myself.  I do.  I breathe deeply.  

My wrist's pain is escalating.  It is fifty bee stings.  It is the size of a teacup.  In minutes my tongue's edges register an intense metallic flavor.  This, I speculate, is good.  My body is cleansing itself of toxins.  The scorpion's thick dark power is flowing through me and out my tongue.  This will be over quickly, like a bad bee sting.  

I am a fool.

Now, a thickening numbness washes away the metal.  It spreads across my tongue, to my gums, and then my lips.  Will it effect my breathing?  Lying down was foolish.  I get up.  Pace the room.  How do you find a doctor in Playa del Carmen?  Maybe I shouldn't pace.  It could spread faster.  I sit on the edge of the bed.  I should go talk to Marta, the landlady.  But the spread of 

numbness, by now in my fingertips also, has stopped.  I have no problem breathing.  I look at the smeared corpse of the scorpion on the tiles.  I'll wait.  See what happens.  

In a half an hour nothing has changed.  The numbness has not decreased.  But it has not increased.  The teacup-sized spot of pain continues to throb hotly.  The walls are feeling close.  I will go outside.

My first steps on the street are tentative.  Should I walk far from my room?  The freshness of the morning, and my pre-scorpion plans, draw me forward.  I change dollars to pesos at a casa de cambio just opened.  I can see, and hear, the frothy green Caribbean just down the street.  It is only five to eight.  I order coffee and rolls at the sidewalk cafe across the street.  Cautious swallowing is an adventure I am delighted to succeed in.  A rain squall chases me, my second coffee, and my red aproned waiter inside.  

When I return to my room I still hurt, I am still numb, my fingers are clumsy, and the scorpion still waits in its black puddle.  I am anxious about toxic or allergic after effects.  But I am determined to proceed, by bus, to my next destination; Puerto Morelos.

I pack my clothes, book, and toiletries.  Then, with pliers, I pick up the scorpion by it's marvelously segmented tail.  The black armor that failed it seems as hard as my bright silver pliers.  I see, at the terminus of its shiny black tail, a tiny needle-like stinger.  Now, ten weeks later, I can still see that black needle.  It is not shiny.  It absorbs light.  The black of the rest of the scorpion, though intense, reflects light like the devil's fire truck.  Not the needle.  I put the scorpion corpse in an unsatisfactory tomb - the wastebasket, wipe up its smear off the tiles, shoulder my bag, and close the door behind me.

"There is a large scorpion, dead, in the trash of my room," I tell Marta when I give her the keys.   "Please warn the maid."

"Did it bite you?" she asks.  "Did your face turn numb?"

Facial numbness, she tells me, is normal with scorpion stings.  

And, she firmly informs me, the scorpion had to have come with me.

"I take precautions," she insists.

I assure her the arachnid was of Guatemalan origin.

It's two months later.  January.  Minnesota.  I'm driving through the cold, in my red car, to town when it dawns on me I can't remember the name of the man I'm to meet with.  I'm dumbfounded by my foolishness.  I think of associations.  I know his wife's unmarried name, for instance.  But my memory is a cold blank.  I resign myself to stumbling through an awkward situation.  I put my concern out of my mind.  Then, five-mile later, the man's first name slams into my consciousness like hot coffee spilled on the lap of my mind.  I had no idea that I was still searching for the name.  But its retrieval into my conscious thought is a hot, physical jolt.  Like a scorpion bite.

Another memory.

There is, on my right index finger, a small gracefully arced scar on the inside of the top digit.  The quarter century old scar is itself a cellular memory.  A brand.  But all I have to do is imagine that scar, I don't even have to look at it, and I can feel the silver saw blade slide neatly through my flesh and see the red flow out of my finger and onto the sawdust.  I could, if I wished, keep the thought of that scar, that slicing flesh, that oozing blood, in my mind constantly, clearly, until it pushed me over some edge I don't want to approach.

That is how the memory of the scorpion will be.  I will always be able, at will and with vivid clarity, to retrieve the feel of the searing pin prick and the black scrabbling on my leg as it takes the shape of a scorpion.  

Why, then, did I forget the beauty of the three blues of Lago Peten Itza almost as soon as I closed the door on that yellow window frame?  I can remember a name to save myself embarrassment, a twenty-five year old wound, and a great scorpion, without effort.  But I struggled so hard with the beauty of the lake and the hills of San Andres.  What is memory for?

Memory is a biological function, perhaps.  Its arrangement is cellular.  Genetic.  Memory is designed to recall where the tiger lives and the viper's shape among the leaves.  It's usefulness evolved with that of adrenaline.  I will bear in mind, next time, to look in my pack for the errant scorpion before stuffing it with my clothes.  Embarrassment, as well, seems biological although 

its triggers are likely cultural.  Embarrassment is cultural adrenaline.  Although they both have their pleasures, memory's schooling is to avoid hot rushes of adrenaline as if they were a teacher's slap.

Beauty is viewed through cultural lenses.  Some of us, who believe we are poetic or sensitive souls, suspect beauty may have universal principles.  But I once watched a malnourished Mexican boy, named Oscar, mindlessly tearing the wings of a magnificent butterfly to shreds.  He fed the parts to ants. I pointed the butterfly's beauty out.  Oscar looked but couldn't see.

Oscar and I are perhaps evolving.  I gazed at, but didn't remember, the beauty outside my window on San Andres' hilltops.  I believed, and still do, that I need beauty to survive.  It gives me hope.  It animates my dim and flickering soul.  From my position of being adequately fed and clothed, beauty, seeing it and remembering it, appears to be a spiritual practice.  And I am merely an acolyte; a simple pilgrim searching.  Perhaps someday beauty's occurrence, and its recall, will have the hot power of a scorpion's sting.  

Tim

Central Minnesota Political