The Kalahari Bushman tribes have four different clicks that they use as consonants. Other South African tribes employ clicks to lesser degrees. The first consonant in the name of Nelson Mandela's tribe, the Xhosa, is a click. Based on DNA evidence, Bushmen groups are thought to be remnants of groups that split off from all of the rest of us, some tens of thousands of years ago, before all of the rest of us split into blacks and whites and Asians and Native Americans and such things. Several extinct Australian Aborigine languages -- spoken by descendents of people who took the first major migration out of Africa, about 40,000 years ago -- were click languages. Some linguists factor in the Aborigines and the Bushmen and triangulate back, and figure that the earliest human languages were probably click languages. I was talking about that with my students and one of them pointed out that nowadays, people use clicks to communicate with animals. You can get the attention of a dog or cat with a few clicks. Some people click at horses to get them moving. Soon after, this video http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=cae7e462bfa605f980fa6844326075a875e13c10 appeared on the New York Times' website, showing a Dinka boy in Sudan taking care of his family's cattle and talking with them using clicks and clucks and other sounds. So I wonder if using clicks to talk with animals might go back thousands and thousands of years. Maybe at some point they fell out of fashion for talking with people, but stayed on in our animal talk as a forgotten remnant of what once was.

A couple months ago in the mountainous center of Austria I attended a conference and trade fair on shamanism. One day, members of a local club devoted to birds of prey showed up, dressed in traditional Austrian clothes and carrying their pets -- two falcons, two hawks and a golden eagle. The birds were very comfortable around people, allowing themselves to be petted. Their faces seemed the essence of pride. They kept forgetting that they were tied to their owners' arms. They would see someplace they wanted to fly to, and launch themselves toward it, and immediately fall in a flurry of feathers that hung by a strap from the owner's leather glove. When this happened, the owner would immediately hoist the bird up again to his wrist, and for another few minutes it would not try to fly anywhere, just stare around boldly, the sovereign of all it surveyed.

The other evening I was reading some of Walt Whitman's prose works from the 1860s, and that period of time in US history seemed vividly alive in my imagination, both oddly familiar and completely alien. In the night I dreamt I had a thick book that described architectural projects undertaken then. I was looking at etchings of monuments. Architects had designed eight or ten different lofty neoclassical buildings with columns and domes, and workers had carved them out of solid stone in the Rocky Mountains, but as negative spaces, leaving building-shaped holes like molds into which some substance could have been poured or sprayed. Tourists would enter them through broad tunnels underneath, and look up into the dimness at the vaults of the domes; there were small skylights cut into the top to let light in.

Hello, can I help you? No, I’m afraid he’s out of the office right now, he’s just stepped out for a bite, it seems he has a meeting at the factory, drinking tea out of the bottom of a very old bathtub seven meters deep. Is there anything I can help you with? Can anyone else help you? Would you care to leave a message? No, I’m not sure when he’ll be back in, could be weeks, days, nanoseconds, he could be here already, hiding, invisible, dissolved in the air or perched like an insect on the curtain, I can almost smell his cologne, I can almost feel his sweat drying on my back. Shall I take a message for him? Just a minute, let me get the message pad. “Bite the wizened rhinoceros at dawn.” Sorry, how do you spell rhinoceros? OK, let me read that back to you. R-H-I-N-O-C-E-R-U-S. Oh, R-O-S. Rhinoceros. Bite the wizened. At dawn. And you need how many pieces of part number 3136655449? Only six? Delivery by airship and antback to be paid by client and takes six business yugas. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. No, I don’t think that’s very wise. In fact it seems to me that you must be some vile creeping carnivore for suggesting it. It’s unforgivably dangerous, cloudy, insipid, mind-boggling, mind-flaying, mind-frogging, 75-sided, wondrous. Goat flames licking up your trouser legs. This naked aggression will not stand. I will unleash upon you the mother of all telephone calls. Have you ever seen an invisible werewolf? I’ll throw hundreds of them at your head like baseballs. Even now I am virtually grinding your naked foot in the invisible meat grinder that I keep on the floor beside by desk. It was very expensive, something like $599, but I got it this past January at a post-Christmas sale for 30% off. It is encrusted with precious stones, but who would ever know, because the darn thing’s invisible, heh-heh. I’ll dam up your workflow with a fifty-billion-dollar construction project. But these are empty threats, because when all is said and done, I am a peaceful person. Currently I am deep in meditation. I have not even stirred to answer the telephone. I'm sitting in a deep golden bathtub atop a high stone tower with the soles of my feet pressed together. So if you think carefully you will also come to the conclusion that I am not speaking to you. You and I are simply fleeting thoughts in the mind of a loving, though somewhat dizzy, God. Good. Good. I’ll tell him you called. OK. OK. Have a nice day. Thanks, you too. Goodbye. Goodbye now.

Dreamt I went to the moon with some friends, just for a couple of hours, to pick strawberries, then came back.

The writer wrote and wrote, drop after drop of ink skydiving out of the pen to land on the page, saying nothing and everything. Meanwhile the wind wrote and wrote upon the earth in its transparent language. The fire wrote upon the wood, and, in doing so, destroyed or transformed it. The smoke sketched its poetry upon the sky, which tore it apart and scattered it to the four directions. The waves wrote upon the shore, endlessly revising. The light wrote upon the darkness and the darkness upon the light, the night upon the day and the day upon the night. The sun writes flowers on the earth. The earth writes people on the sky. The people write poems. The poems contain things like people and animals, suns, moons, and stars, fires and winds and waters. The poems cradle these things gently like immense hands. Everyone knows that people write poems, but what's a little less obvious is that poems write people too.