Vaseline Buddha Read Free Page B

taking a walk in the woods near my house one evening.
    (Between the moment when I’m writing a sentence and the moment when the thing spoken of in the sentence actually or fictionally took place, there’s a space like a river that must be crossed by swimming, and I could be swept away by the current to a wrong place while crossing the river.)
    At that moment, I thought that I could make certain motifs appear repeatedly in my story—you could say that that’s the only idea I came up with while contemplating this story—while thinking that I could write something about someone who constantly felt dizzy, and at the same time, thinking that I had witnessed in the past scenes similar to that of the birds soaring into the darkening sky and disappearing.
    It’s true, however, that around that time, I was thinking a lot about a species of parrot called kea that lives in the highlands of New Zealand, which I happened to read about in a newspaper article, but it’s clear that the fact bears no direct relation to how I came to write this. . . But is it so clear?
    Through the article, I found out that keas are birds that have feathers with a green tint, are bigger than ordinary parrots and intelligent enough to push or pull an object in a certain order so as to obtain food, are full of curiosity, and go through clothes and stuff people leave lying around, taking a short break while traveling, and take out the things in the pockets or just fly away with the clothes in their beaks, and have a cruel eating habit in which they alight mostly on sheep feeding on grass and make them die a slow, painful death, by delving into the sheep’s bodies using their beaks and claws and eating the kidneys, but the paper did not carry a picture of the birds and I couldn’t see what they looked like.
    In reality the sheep may flee, or put up a struggle, at least, instead of having their kidneys ripped out by parrots while quietly grazing on grass, but in my imagination they are quietly grazing on grass even as their kidneys are being ripped out by the parrots. The feeling that sheep, which graze on grass incessantly to satisfy or appease a hunger that isn’t easily satisfied or appeased, feel with the greatest intensity in their life is probably none other than hunger, and it must be their fate to feel constant hunger. (Some facts, though irrelevant to me, lead me to feel pain or think about pain just because they are facts, and the fact about the sheep in the highlands of New Zealand is among them.)
    The sheep, unlike some monkeys that, looking very startled, cry out in a quite peculiar way, meaning, Watch out, eagles, when feeling threatened by eagles that prey on them, may think, The only way for us to beat those parrots is to flaunt our fearsome silence while having our kidneys ripped out, and this may serve as a clue in understanding the fearsome silence of sheep. And there’s something humorous about another aspect of sheep in my mind, which is that they release methane, a greenhouse gas, as they quietly, and solemnly, burp. A cycle of revenge is created in which keas, which have lived in the highlands of New Zealand for a long time in my fantasy about sheep taking revenge on humans who have long been slaughtering them, by quietly and solemnly releasing methane, take revenge on sheep, brought by European immigrants, which have invaded their territory, and sheep take revenge on humans (this is one of the many notions I have of sheep), and humans take revenge on everything for no good reason (this seems very human to me). I imagine that herbivores that stuff themselves with things they shouldn’t eat, things that are raised as livestock by humans, because humans force them to eat such things, are taking revenge now only by quietly burping and farting, but that they are quietly and solemnly preparing a great revenge which defies comparison to burps or farts, and that it’ll come as a great catastrophe to