The Golem of Los Angeles

Parable of the South Pole Buddha

66 Parable of the South Pole Buddha “ . . . the most tiny quantity of reality ever imagined by a human being” A physicist is stuck in a bunker at the South Pole, freezing his burrito off, and trying to detect the rare light given off by one in six billion neutrinos streaking through the glacial ice, and it turns out he’s a guy i like talking poetry with sometimes and before he zooms to the white continent he tries to explain neutrinos to me, like a priest describing the progress of the spirit to a child. No, they’re not that three-piece punk band from Philadelphia, making dancers oscillate in clubs then fall into each other like so much dark matter. Like most of us, they have a mean life and a half-life. Like most of us they decay too fast. But here’s the wonder: these particles are so tiny, so unaffected, they shoot right through the planet and through us without so much as setting an electron quivering like a dragonfly’s wing. i wish i could do that, instead of lying in bed, feeling gravity glue me to the indentation in the mattress, wish i could jet right through the world like cosmic rain, a flight of neutrinos shaped like a poet and riding on the magic carpet of a weightless bed. No tax forms, no lawyers, no dentists to drill through the crown to the rot and murder the root— just stick my face in the pillow and jellyfish through. 67 i try to let go of my body, to drop without a parachute, a little Buddha, neither hot nor cold, but i can’t lift off like my friend who’s gone to glacial nowhere and who sets up his machines while the unseen wind whishes by into the heart of cold, thinking he can measure the invisible, thinking he might actually understand what distinguishes us from nothing. ...