In September we start ploughing the fields. The farmer plonks me on a 40 year old Allis Chalmers crawler tractor model HD7 with steering clutches. Up and down those fields I go like a clockwork toy. By then I’m barely eating. I’m not sure why. I just lost the habit or can’t be bothered. The days seem to get even longer with me just staring at brown furrows. I become rather captivated by tractors and crawlers, read about them, even boy a poster with the most popular models.
One night I return home. My body is on the bed and the usual furnishings and carpet and windows are in place. It is the dark of the night. I check around the room. Everything is in its place. Everything smells and hums and vibes the same yet in the hypersensitive scanners of my knowing I perceive that something of the fundamental structure of this experience of the room and me is different. I check again. Yes, everything is where it should be. My body is on the bed. The furniture is the same and the carpet and the windows are of the same design and positioned in the same places as when I went to bed. It is definitely the room I went to sleep in and although time has trickled along through the night everything remains the same. Even these thoughts are flavoured with the same recipe of me that I have applied moment-to-moment since I became aware of my existence. I check again. The furniture is the same and the carpet and the windows are of the same design and positioned as they were when I went to bed. Something is warmly, sumptuously, frighteningly and serenely different. what can it be? I taste the same flavours of my thoughts. I smell the same scent of my essence. I hear my soul. It is the same me that I knew before my sleep. Yet something is different. I check again. My body is on the bed. The furniture is the same and the carpet and the windows are of the same design and positioned as they were when I went to bed. Yes, everything is positioned the same and it is the same room. I check again and then the screech of an owl outside breaks my attention. Then the town clock chimes and suddenly it is clear to me that the change is identifiable; for in the screech of the owl and the chime of the clock I was not the body on the bed, nor was I the furniture in the room, nor the windows, nor the carpet, that somehow, during the depth of my sleep I have gained the capacity to be the very objects to which my attention attaches itself. For a split-second I am the carpet and then the wool of the carpet and even a prominent strand of the carpet. Upon reflection, I was not the owl exactly but I was the screech of the owl. I was not the clock but I was the chime of it. I am not even the body on the bed, rather I am, whenever I momentarily regard it, the experience of the body. I am also the darkness and the night. Even the recipe of me that I have applied moment-to moment since I became aware of my existence is but an experience somehow being had by an Overme, a metallic Overme. I check again and find it is all true again and again and again and in the full particle-jangling realisation of all this I realise the walls around me have crumbled and collapsed and that more than I ever thought I would be, more than high-status lawyer, a decorated military general or an esteemed surgeon. I have surpassed all the predictions from parents who said I was a loafer, a waster who would never amount to anything. Here amidst the falling rubble I finally know what I am. I am an Allis Chalmers crawler tractor model HD7.