Fortune may favor the bold, but surely such a fickle fate has its own heightened sense of humor. Fortune may just as well favor the ridiculous, the sublime, the bored, the indifferent. Occasionally even the mortal, electronic gods at Yahoo pick up on such flavors in the celestial air, giving us a scent of the absurd but intricate designs that govern our lives. (Or appear to, at any rate.)
There may yet be a means by which we can diminish how fortune and fate plot our perils; alternate routes in the human map may be detected if we look at the map with all of our might.
The other day a story appeared that told the unlikely and amusing tale of a wife browsing through old photographs with her husband of a trip to Disneyland taken long ago, in childhood. The husband noticed somebody suspiciously, intimately familiar hovering in the back of the photo, an extra in the movie of his wife's life. Only that extra happened to be his own father.
Can such a coincidence be any more contrived? In a film, a play, a book, or even perhaps in the hidden safety and carefully obscured nook of our own nighttime dreams, we would not readily accept such a concoction. Life, however (or what we recognize 'life to be), needs to construct no such shields against the impossibility of circumstance. People wander in and out of each other's photographs, and, decades later, are brought together once more by matrimony.
It's all too simple to let fate get off easy in such a scenario. We can barter around empty words and familiar phrases like 'incredible', 'what are the odds', 'it just goes to show you', 'you never can tell', and comfort ourselves with the odd, innate bizarreness of the lives that we live, never pausing to acknowledge that although we may very well be the captains of our own ship, the possibility of us being players on someone else's stage, spouting lines written by our own, unknown creators.
That, too, is an easy out. The gods may very well be pushing us around as blithely or intently as we move a pawn into its next position on our chessboards, but such a possibility allows us to be the passive creatures we long to become, the fish that are gently removed from the hooks of the rods of disappointed children and tossed casually back into the water to swim another day.
Perhaps we nudge our fates in manners we cannot assess. Perhaps this woman, this wife, long ago, as a child, beamed brightly at her future father-in-law out of the corner of her mouth as the picture was being snapped. He smiled back, thinking to himself: What a grand and sweet gesture, to be smiled at by a child on the first day of spring. For days, even weeks afterwards, he felt warmed in a way that he could not explain. He was nicer to his own wife and children. He tossed the ball with his son and played Barbies with his daughter. Goodness rippled forth from his every action. The son felt loved, gained confidence, became humane in interior places where before he had been but a boy. Years later, his future wife recognized such humanity in his tone and fell for the man she sensed he might become, given time and a certain tilt on her part. Not knowing that she had started the whole cycle in motion as a child. (Are not most children indifferent to the sorrow and joy they engender in others?)
I'm tempted to take a camera, any camera, any size, and prowl the streets by day and by night, snapping random shots of ordinary people, hoping that something human in the air will somehow shift to a larger, cosmic benevolence by the click of a lens. Perhaps someone will sense what my pursuit entails, even if I can not articulate it in words. The photos will capture a spirit and, instead of diminishing or destroying its essence, as inland tribes still believe (or so I'm told), the stolen image will flash their very beings into a higher form of connection.
We wander in and out of other's photos, usually hiding ourselves, not wanting to ruin someone else's shot. In the forefront of our own existence and the backgroud of everyone else's. Should a camera lens be wide enough to capture the entire planet in one glorious, panoramic backdrop of smiles and waves, everyone a star, no one an extra, would that be enough to banish coincidence's frustrating, perplexing hold on our lives to a distant land where it would haunt us no more?
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Wednesday, June 09, 2010
A SOUL AT WORK IN THE SCRAPING OF A SHOE
A wad of gum gunked itself onto the sole of my shoe last night. I stood on the train. It crept onto the bottom of my foot. Somewhere between Ebina station and Sagamino Station. I scraped it off. A few moments later, there it was again, a glob of greenish, bluish, grayish goo. Persistent, it was. Almost insistent. Finally I flicked it off by aggressively rubbing one shoe against the other, like a praying mantis biding its time, and it finally rested, defeated, but not broken, against the side of the door. Soon someone else would come along, and its covert scheme could begin anew.
Perhaps I am being somewhat superior in my tone. Should I have said 'soul' of my shoe, rather than 'sole'? For I am almost certain that this particular piece of chewing gum was not merely an inert, passive player in its own pathetic tale. I did not intend to step on that gum; it found itself on myself. And if such a motive can be ascribed to a lowly scrap of discarded candy, who is to say that black dress shoes bought for $20 twenty dollars in the Philippines do not have their own modest depths of identity? If the ancient Japanese believed that the rocks and the rivers, the caves and the trees all contained infinite depths of awareness and their own, inscrutable form of consciousness, perhaps a lowly pair of workwear can hold similar spiritual flexibility. I wear the shoes, but they may be wearing me in turn. A somewhat disturbing thought.
There could have been magnetic wars at work that eluded me last night, some kind of subtle war between the stretchy, flexible essence of gum and the stolid, solid resiliency of cheap leather. (If leather is, indeed, what these shoes are made of; how foolish! To trod daily with a substance clasped close to one's skin whose very identity you remain indifferent to, if not contemptuous of!) If mankind can embark on centuries of apocalyptic warfare merely because our philosophies of the spirit differ in tone and structure, perhaps a smaller, subtle form of malice is being enacted between the tactile, unconscious shapes on this world.
I can claim no scientific superiority, but I know enough to state that what we see as solid is, in fact, little more than a swirling and whirling and twisting and turning mass of atoms and electrons and neutrons clashing at each other with all the miniature force of a thousand roller coasters ramming towards one their mechanical destiny at one and the same time, a free-for-all of controlled chaos held together by the most intricate of designs. And who are we to claim that the smallest among us might not possess their own form of sincere, albeit primitive, awareness?
Perhaps the restless molecules at work in that piece of gum and these pair of shoes I wear are so tragically minute that they are not aware of the physical forces at play in their random collisions. (And are we truly conscious of why we do what we do? Of who we clash with? Of those we scrape away?) I can conceive of a situation where the fluidity of the molecules locked inside, indeed forming the very marrow, of that slab of chewing gum, suddenly rebelled at the arrogant, unyielding stiffness of my shoes. Jealousy may not be limited to the human realm, as any animal lover can attest to. Atoms, too, have their own internal dynamics, and they could very well be spiritual ones. Enough was enough, the gum decided. If the shoes will flaunt their solidity, I will flare my own flexibility. Let the war begin!
Indifferently scraping that gum off of my shoe, I almost felt a sting. Of this I swear. (Even the smallest things can hold the greatest of grudges.)
On a train hurtling through the Kanagawa countryside, in the country of Japan, on the planet earth, I showed the objects of this world who was boss, I sure did, while somewhere up above, far away, in space, something similar is looking down at us, getting ready to scrub the earth off the bottom of its pride.
Perhaps I am being somewhat superior in my tone. Should I have said 'soul' of my shoe, rather than 'sole'? For I am almost certain that this particular piece of chewing gum was not merely an inert, passive player in its own pathetic tale. I did not intend to step on that gum; it found itself on myself. And if such a motive can be ascribed to a lowly scrap of discarded candy, who is to say that black dress shoes bought for $20 twenty dollars in the Philippines do not have their own modest depths of identity? If the ancient Japanese believed that the rocks and the rivers, the caves and the trees all contained infinite depths of awareness and their own, inscrutable form of consciousness, perhaps a lowly pair of workwear can hold similar spiritual flexibility. I wear the shoes, but they may be wearing me in turn. A somewhat disturbing thought.
There could have been magnetic wars at work that eluded me last night, some kind of subtle war between the stretchy, flexible essence of gum and the stolid, solid resiliency of cheap leather. (If leather is, indeed, what these shoes are made of; how foolish! To trod daily with a substance clasped close to one's skin whose very identity you remain indifferent to, if not contemptuous of!) If mankind can embark on centuries of apocalyptic warfare merely because our philosophies of the spirit differ in tone and structure, perhaps a smaller, subtle form of malice is being enacted between the tactile, unconscious shapes on this world.
I can claim no scientific superiority, but I know enough to state that what we see as solid is, in fact, little more than a swirling and whirling and twisting and turning mass of atoms and electrons and neutrons clashing at each other with all the miniature force of a thousand roller coasters ramming towards one their mechanical destiny at one and the same time, a free-for-all of controlled chaos held together by the most intricate of designs. And who are we to claim that the smallest among us might not possess their own form of sincere, albeit primitive, awareness?
Perhaps the restless molecules at work in that piece of gum and these pair of shoes I wear are so tragically minute that they are not aware of the physical forces at play in their random collisions. (And are we truly conscious of why we do what we do? Of who we clash with? Of those we scrape away?) I can conceive of a situation where the fluidity of the molecules locked inside, indeed forming the very marrow, of that slab of chewing gum, suddenly rebelled at the arrogant, unyielding stiffness of my shoes. Jealousy may not be limited to the human realm, as any animal lover can attest to. Atoms, too, have their own internal dynamics, and they could very well be spiritual ones. Enough was enough, the gum decided. If the shoes will flaunt their solidity, I will flare my own flexibility. Let the war begin!
Indifferently scraping that gum off of my shoe, I almost felt a sting. Of this I swear. (Even the smallest things can hold the greatest of grudges.)
On a train hurtling through the Kanagawa countryside, in the country of Japan, on the planet earth, I showed the objects of this world who was boss, I sure did, while somewhere up above, far away, in space, something similar is looking down at us, getting ready to scrub the earth off the bottom of its pride.
Tuesday, June 08, 2010
OSWALD AT ATSUGI, ETERNALLY
Do lost souls sometimes stay marooned inside a limbo of their own construction, forever haunting gates of former glory? Devising a spiritual escape route that inevitably coils back only to the hollow basement of one's own mendacious spirit must be a futile enterprise for the most valiant of ghosts, but for a fragile ghoul one can only imagine the frustration that must accumulate, as grungy, useless moss nevertheless accumulates atop the most obstinate stone.
Such were my thoughts while running past the melodramatically militaresque gates of Atsugi Naval Base not ten minutes from my apartment, the same base that launched Gary Powers over Russia decades ago, a crash landing that landed him in the Soviet Union and America itself into a new, more suspicious era. That fact alone would be enough to guarantee a certain degree of historical infamy for Atsugi base; the addition of one Lee Harvey Oswald to its illustrious alumni only adds to the absurd historical resonance that blandly spews forth from its gates like lazy heat waves on Florida tarmac.
Oswald. The name itself haunts me. The place itself reminds me. For here was the very spot where young, troubled Lee served while in the U.S. military, before defecting to Russia, before coming back home to plot and plan and stew and fail at almost everything he tried, succeeding only in the ultimate success that would give him any cold comfort, the murder of the president.
And myself, only minutes away on foot! To encounter the roots of one's obsession is surely a fortuitous and dangerous endeavour. For years as an adolescent I was entangled within the sticky web which is the Kennedy assassination and all its attendant lore, convinced that it was a mammoth, intricate plot conceived at the highest levels of the American government. (Such grand schemes are especially attractive to the adolescent mind, who is foiled at every turn, whether it be by the combination to his locker or the forgotten bus ticket gloating on his dresser at home!) In recent years, I've come to the reluctant conclusion that it was Oswald, alone. (My conclusion helped in no small part by Vincent Bugliosi's brilliant book Reclaiming History.) Cool summer nights in the basement of our house by the lake are intermingled with me crashed on the couch, reading long into the night about Oswald and his sad, mysteriously vacant life -- the life of a ghost long before he became one himself.
For I feel Oswald's presence as I run by Atsugi's base.
Fifty years have come and gone since Oswald last stepped through those gates. The Cold War has frozen and fizzled and faded. A new era of terror has enveloped us this past decade.
And yet those gates remain.
Hardly daunting, one must admit. The entrance to Atsugi could very well be that of a modern-day theme park. I half expect Chevy Chase and his motley clan to pull up front in a vintage Volkswagon sedan and embark on the vacation of a lifetime, 'Wally World in the Far East'. Japanese and American flags crisscross themselves in a half-hearted, insincere embrace. Families wander in and out, bored kids chewing gum while their heavy mothers pull down their tank-tops to cover their fleshy bulges that just won't fit. At one point in time, John Wayne himself, the Duke of all dukes, visited the troops here for a morale-boosting session, chowing down for a little r and r and rah-rah-rah; a photo even exists of the fabled movie star eating lunch in the cafeteria with the men in green while a young man stands distant in the doorway. Oswald himself, leaching onto history (albeit of a celluoid kind), for the first but not the last time.
On a sunny spring Sunday afternoon there is nothing remotely sinister about an American military base in suburban Yokohama, and I yet I feel a chill each and every week. I do not know where we go when we die, and I suspect that Oswald's spirit, if such a thing exists, long ago ventured into other, less hospitable realms.
And yet I cannot be certain. For once he tread these very same streets that I so casually jog upon. He was known to have a Japanese girlfriend at the time of his enlistment, her identity a secrete still. I wonder if she lives here still, a woman of seventy, holding onto a secret that is her own, dark treasure. The wrinkled, old lady I casually run past could very well be the former mistress of the assassin of John F.Kennedy, and I almost wince while writing these words, so powerful are their black impact. A life well lived with a family raised true is all well and good, but to have been the concubine of a president's murderer!
For such reasons I am sometimes certain that Oswald haunts these parts. Who is to say that we do not become that which we once were, or reside in that place where we once thrived? For here it was where Oswald put his plans in motion, saving money for his Russian odyssey, studying the language, envisioning the future life he would lead, that of a great man doing noble deeds. If our soul endures past the point of physical decay, and is too craven or barren to be allowed admittance to a higher, gentler realm, then to our past it must return, if not literally, then at least to the physical plain where we once stood tall.
I cannot be sure, and I will not be adamant, but there must be dark winter nights at the gates of Atsugi when the chill of the December air mixes with the cold fury of Oswald's roaming spectre. A physical frission from a spiritual brush. He is bound to this place by his own dark rage. Always a bold, brash, insecure soul, I imagine his ghostlike self is of a similar mold, convinced that another glory lies somewhere in his future, but forever locked into a redundant orbit. Doomed to haunt tangible gates from his past that once led to only the future and now refuse to open to even his past.
Such were my thoughts while running past the melodramatically militaresque gates of Atsugi Naval Base not ten minutes from my apartment, the same base that launched Gary Powers over Russia decades ago, a crash landing that landed him in the Soviet Union and America itself into a new, more suspicious era. That fact alone would be enough to guarantee a certain degree of historical infamy for Atsugi base; the addition of one Lee Harvey Oswald to its illustrious alumni only adds to the absurd historical resonance that blandly spews forth from its gates like lazy heat waves on Florida tarmac.
Oswald. The name itself haunts me. The place itself reminds me. For here was the very spot where young, troubled Lee served while in the U.S. military, before defecting to Russia, before coming back home to plot and plan and stew and fail at almost everything he tried, succeeding only in the ultimate success that would give him any cold comfort, the murder of the president.
And myself, only minutes away on foot! To encounter the roots of one's obsession is surely a fortuitous and dangerous endeavour. For years as an adolescent I was entangled within the sticky web which is the Kennedy assassination and all its attendant lore, convinced that it was a mammoth, intricate plot conceived at the highest levels of the American government. (Such grand schemes are especially attractive to the adolescent mind, who is foiled at every turn, whether it be by the combination to his locker or the forgotten bus ticket gloating on his dresser at home!) In recent years, I've come to the reluctant conclusion that it was Oswald, alone. (My conclusion helped in no small part by Vincent Bugliosi's brilliant book Reclaiming History.) Cool summer nights in the basement of our house by the lake are intermingled with me crashed on the couch, reading long into the night about Oswald and his sad, mysteriously vacant life -- the life of a ghost long before he became one himself.
For I feel Oswald's presence as I run by Atsugi's base.
Fifty years have come and gone since Oswald last stepped through those gates. The Cold War has frozen and fizzled and faded. A new era of terror has enveloped us this past decade.
And yet those gates remain.
Hardly daunting, one must admit. The entrance to Atsugi could very well be that of a modern-day theme park. I half expect Chevy Chase and his motley clan to pull up front in a vintage Volkswagon sedan and embark on the vacation of a lifetime, 'Wally World in the Far East'. Japanese and American flags crisscross themselves in a half-hearted, insincere embrace. Families wander in and out, bored kids chewing gum while their heavy mothers pull down their tank-tops to cover their fleshy bulges that just won't fit. At one point in time, John Wayne himself, the Duke of all dukes, visited the troops here for a morale-boosting session, chowing down for a little r and r and rah-rah-rah; a photo even exists of the fabled movie star eating lunch in the cafeteria with the men in green while a young man stands distant in the doorway. Oswald himself, leaching onto history (albeit of a celluoid kind), for the first but not the last time.
On a sunny spring Sunday afternoon there is nothing remotely sinister about an American military base in suburban Yokohama, and I yet I feel a chill each and every week. I do not know where we go when we die, and I suspect that Oswald's spirit, if such a thing exists, long ago ventured into other, less hospitable realms.
And yet I cannot be certain. For once he tread these very same streets that I so casually jog upon. He was known to have a Japanese girlfriend at the time of his enlistment, her identity a secrete still. I wonder if she lives here still, a woman of seventy, holding onto a secret that is her own, dark treasure. The wrinkled, old lady I casually run past could very well be the former mistress of the assassin of John F.Kennedy, and I almost wince while writing these words, so powerful are their black impact. A life well lived with a family raised true is all well and good, but to have been the concubine of a president's murderer!
For such reasons I am sometimes certain that Oswald haunts these parts. Who is to say that we do not become that which we once were, or reside in that place where we once thrived? For here it was where Oswald put his plans in motion, saving money for his Russian odyssey, studying the language, envisioning the future life he would lead, that of a great man doing noble deeds. If our soul endures past the point of physical decay, and is too craven or barren to be allowed admittance to a higher, gentler realm, then to our past it must return, if not literally, then at least to the physical plain where we once stood tall.
I cannot be sure, and I will not be adamant, but there must be dark winter nights at the gates of Atsugi when the chill of the December air mixes with the cold fury of Oswald's roaming spectre. A physical frission from a spiritual brush. He is bound to this place by his own dark rage. Always a bold, brash, insecure soul, I imagine his ghostlike self is of a similar mold, convinced that another glory lies somewhere in his future, but forever locked into a redundant orbit. Doomed to haunt tangible gates from his past that once led to only the future and now refuse to open to even his past.
Monday, June 07, 2010
NIAGARA FALLS OVER MOBY-DICK
"Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it?"
-- Herman Melville
Moby-Dick
Since nobody in the world I've been living in for the past eleven years -- the Asian world, the countries of Japan, Cambodia and the Philippines -- has ever heard of my hometown, St.Catharines, I tend to identify my starting point in this life as being a small city near Niagara Falls, that globally recognized symbol of natural awe and cheap honeymoons. That cascading descent of water, mamoth in scale, miniscule in interest (to me) for most of my life.
The mention of this place is sure to gain a jolt of second-hand recognition from all who hear its name, no?
Not necessarily.
On my first visit to Cambodia, long before I decided to live there, me and a handful of Japanese volunteers were guest-speakers at a high school in the second-largest city in the country, Battambang, near the Thai border. Upon telling the students that I grew up not far from Niagara Falls, instead of involuntary nods of recognition and surprised smiles I faced, instead, an adolescent sky of blank, indifferent stares. Later, in the same class, I showed the students a small Canadian flag, explaining that the red maple leaf was placed in the centre as a symbol of Canada itself. Made for a good story, I guess, true or not. The teacher then vigorously nodded his head and explained to the malleable students that the same principle applied to the Australian flag, which, as everyone knew, featured a kangaroo in the middle. I smiled and nodded. (One does not publicly deny and insult the hard-won knowledge of a high school teacher in Battambang, Cambodia.)
Natural wonders of the world attract and enhance curious minds, but I often imagine that modern-day Egyptians living amongst the pyramids must feel the way that those of use raised in the misty outskirts of Niagara Falls often feel: bored, indifferent, bluntly amused by what all the damn fuss is about. I can count on one hand, probably, the number of times I visited the Falls to see the Falls, from the ages of zero to eighteen. Come to think of it, that number may very well include my trips to the city itself (a fact which often astonishes many a foreigner I've met -- that the Falls is not merely a ready-made-photo-backdrop but is also a place to live and die and divorce and eat in.) My most vivid memory of the place as a whole remains not the time I was not saved from certain death by Superman soaring through the sky as he did to a reckless young lad playing on the Canadian side of the Falls in Superman II -- a common daydream for kids lucky enough to have grown up in the Niagara region -- but rather a night spent in downtown Niaraga Falls, watching professional wrestling in a dingy stadium in front-row seats acquired by a friend of my father's who worked for the city. Slapping the Junkyard Dog on his gigantic, sweaty back and marvelling at the a) intense and b) quite obviously pre-rehearsed and fake exploits of the tag-team of the British Bulldogs.
(Wonders of the world are all well and good for the history books and Facebook photo montages, but they can't approximate the childhood awe one can hold for WWF wrestlers. Or adulthood awe, apparently, as WWF chairman Vince McMahon's wife is spending her way to a Senate seat in Connecticut even as I write these words, I think.)
No man is a hero to his valet, and no natural wonder is wondrous to its smaller, lesser, all too human neighbours. Beautiful, yes; and not without its own quaint charm, to be sure. But as a beacon for the world's lovers?
Only now, years removed from the days and nights of my youth, can I begin to appreciate the Falls in that respectful, mythic manner. Every culture needs its own mythology, its own vantage point from which to hurtle oneself into eternity via a wooden barrel. We must all, eventually, come to terms with the soil from which we sprung. Reading Moby-Dick for the first time at the age of 34, I come across a reference to Niagara Falls, and I remember where I came from, an unknown city known very well to me and my circle of youth. Reading this 19th century classic, coming across that sudden, welcome jolt, I think not of the glorious path of another boat, the Maid of the Mist, which took us under the waterfall and gave us a brisk taste of its watery embrace, but instead of a night spent watching Emmaneul 'Webster' Lewis and Marc 'Skippy' Price perform at Yuk Yuk's comedy club in the city itself. (The absurd is so often intertwined with the awesome, is it not?)
-- Herman Melville
Moby-Dick
Since nobody in the world I've been living in for the past eleven years -- the Asian world, the countries of Japan, Cambodia and the Philippines -- has ever heard of my hometown, St.Catharines, I tend to identify my starting point in this life as being a small city near Niagara Falls, that globally recognized symbol of natural awe and cheap honeymoons. That cascading descent of water, mamoth in scale, miniscule in interest (to me) for most of my life.
The mention of this place is sure to gain a jolt of second-hand recognition from all who hear its name, no?
Not necessarily.
On my first visit to Cambodia, long before I decided to live there, me and a handful of Japanese volunteers were guest-speakers at a high school in the second-largest city in the country, Battambang, near the Thai border. Upon telling the students that I grew up not far from Niagara Falls, instead of involuntary nods of recognition and surprised smiles I faced, instead, an adolescent sky of blank, indifferent stares. Later, in the same class, I showed the students a small Canadian flag, explaining that the red maple leaf was placed in the centre as a symbol of Canada itself. Made for a good story, I guess, true or not. The teacher then vigorously nodded his head and explained to the malleable students that the same principle applied to the Australian flag, which, as everyone knew, featured a kangaroo in the middle. I smiled and nodded. (One does not publicly deny and insult the hard-won knowledge of a high school teacher in Battambang, Cambodia.)
Natural wonders of the world attract and enhance curious minds, but I often imagine that modern-day Egyptians living amongst the pyramids must feel the way that those of use raised in the misty outskirts of Niagara Falls often feel: bored, indifferent, bluntly amused by what all the damn fuss is about. I can count on one hand, probably, the number of times I visited the Falls to see the Falls, from the ages of zero to eighteen. Come to think of it, that number may very well include my trips to the city itself (a fact which often astonishes many a foreigner I've met -- that the Falls is not merely a ready-made-photo-backdrop but is also a place to live and die and divorce and eat in.) My most vivid memory of the place as a whole remains not the time I was not saved from certain death by Superman soaring through the sky as he did to a reckless young lad playing on the Canadian side of the Falls in Superman II -- a common daydream for kids lucky enough to have grown up in the Niagara region -- but rather a night spent in downtown Niaraga Falls, watching professional wrestling in a dingy stadium in front-row seats acquired by a friend of my father's who worked for the city. Slapping the Junkyard Dog on his gigantic, sweaty back and marvelling at the a) intense and b) quite obviously pre-rehearsed and fake exploits of the tag-team of the British Bulldogs.
(Wonders of the world are all well and good for the history books and Facebook photo montages, but they can't approximate the childhood awe one can hold for WWF wrestlers. Or adulthood awe, apparently, as WWF chairman Vince McMahon's wife is spending her way to a Senate seat in Connecticut even as I write these words, I think.)
No man is a hero to his valet, and no natural wonder is wondrous to its smaller, lesser, all too human neighbours. Beautiful, yes; and not without its own quaint charm, to be sure. But as a beacon for the world's lovers?
Only now, years removed from the days and nights of my youth, can I begin to appreciate the Falls in that respectful, mythic manner. Every culture needs its own mythology, its own vantage point from which to hurtle oneself into eternity via a wooden barrel. We must all, eventually, come to terms with the soil from which we sprung. Reading Moby-Dick for the first time at the age of 34, I come across a reference to Niagara Falls, and I remember where I came from, an unknown city known very well to me and my circle of youth. Reading this 19th century classic, coming across that sudden, welcome jolt, I think not of the glorious path of another boat, the Maid of the Mist, which took us under the waterfall and gave us a brisk taste of its watery embrace, but instead of a night spent watching Emmaneul 'Webster' Lewis and Marc 'Skippy' Price perform at Yuk Yuk's comedy club in the city itself. (The absurd is so often intertwined with the awesome, is it not?)
Sunday, June 06, 2010
WHERE HE HAS TO BE
Shall we pity a president who must endure the musings of a famous McCartney on a Wednesday night at the White House? Surely one can imagine a less attractive way of spending a midweek evening at the dawn of summer in Washington after a winter of dreary discontent. Having one's beloved serenaded by the bard of the Beatles inevitably must secure some most deserved brownie points in that growing list of debts kept in the ledger maintained in that most exclusive, solitary club in the world: spouse of the U.S. president. And to have Sir Paul sing 'Michelle' to one's own Michelle must surely make Barack more than a little festive inside. What a conversation will be enacted later that night between the president and his wife! (Gossip is gossip, but presidential gossip between the Commander in Chief and his own wife between the sheets? Of such intimacies sonnets could be written!)
Still, one can speculate. All lives are surreal in and of themselves when aligned next to one another, but the life of the American president must somehow stand separate from the rest, if only because the nature of the profession requires daily duties that border on the narrow line separating the surreal and the tragic. Waking up to a shower and a shave and a daughter inquring as to when that 'hole will be plugged' ranks as one of the most flippant and profound comments a president has made in many years. Whereas most of us prepare for work with a sensation somewhere between indifference and a tiny, spiralling dread that expands ever outwards as the morning unwinds, the United States president must kiss his kids off to school and then proceed down the hall to a small, sterile room where black-suited functionaries blandly recite who, what and where the intelligence services of the most powerful country in the world have harmed in the past twenty-four hours, leading to a sensation in the great leader's stomach that could be similar to a cancer patient being told that there is hope, yes, but of the most fragile and tenuous kind. To start the day learning that one's secret missles have accidentally killed an Afghani family of four (which remains a specualtion on my part, to be sure, but speculation, through its very flexibility, can achieve a kind of moral truth that facts can only leer at), and end the evening by singing along with 'Hey Jude' to Paul MCartney while the television cameras capture your every moment for a broadcast, for history, for the fact that a president's job is to have his every moment frozen in bloodless time simply because that is what a president is for, to have an image we can analyze and judge, forgive or forget, to have that arc explain the span of one's day, surely must make a man sleep the sleep of the driven or the dead. Sleep like a man who has been shown the insides of the carcass he has killed, or sleep like a man who has been given a sedative strong enough to blunt a bear.
We judge a president not by what he does, or says, but what he shows. And Obama shows a driven, intent, subdued individual who maintains a temperament akin to a tightroper walker forcefully but elegantly striding the divide between glory and certain, plummenting death. His smile is broad and white and seemingly genuine, but 'one may smile and smile and be a villian', in the words of Shakespeare, and while Obama is not a villian (in my naive eyes), he is certainly a human, and humans can drift the lines of moral certainty like wood on the water.
I can only imagine Obama listening to Paul McCartney serenade his wife. How strange a moment for the boy from Hawaii! Years ago he was a little boy visting the Big Buddha in the ancient town of Kamakura, Japan, not far from where I now live, and now he was sitting in the White House, watching a Beatle praise him and his wife. All that day he had been dealing with BP oil spills and random missles fired in Afghanistan and God only knows what else the American president deals with on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute basis. For a moment, everything seemed so electric and ordinary: a middle-aged man at a Beatles concert. Forget, if you can, that this was a private show (shared with the entire planet). Ignore, if you must, that only seats away from Obama, hidden from view, sat a man with the case containing the nuclear access codes that accompany the president wherever he goes. (And what a strange and ludicrous existence that job entails! Oh, to be inside of the consciousness of the man whose fingers wrap themselves around such a suitcase on a daily basis! Eternity and armaggedon at ones fingertips twenty-four seven! Was such an occupation even hinted at by him in his high school yearbook? ) Disregard, if possible, the stressed and sweaty people with sleeves rolled up and eyes slouching shut working in unknown rooms even at that late hour, downing coffee and cursing their coworkers who get to watch McCartney sing his songs while they are left with the task of designing ways to minimize the means by which innocent civilians have their heads severed and torsos splattered. All that remains, after such separation, is one Barack Obama, a smile on his face, listening to the music of, if not his generation, precisely, at least that of his era's approximate fellows.
Inside of his mind I imagine Obama returning to that day in Kamakura, Japan. A little boy with his mother in a strange land. Staring up at a mammoth stone Buddha who remains blandly impassive to all of life's disastrous follies and unspeakable (but not unacceptable!) atrocities. The American president must be a consummate actor, and so there is little indication that he is doing anything at this moment other than enjoying the rare privilege of a Beatle applauding his courage and integrity. The smile is white and the eyes are flashing that Obama flash. Tomorrow he will have to fix the oil spill. Deal with Pakistan. Scold the C.I.A. Welcome a group of overachieving inner city kids for their fifteen minutes with the president. Remember to compliment Michelle on her new haircut. Try not to scold the kids so much at dinnertime for slurping their milk, which they think is funny, and he does not. (Dealing with the Russian bureaucracy only five minutes before six is surely one way in which a family dinner can be ruined! Nothing spreads gloom like the gnarld machinations of a former Soviet infrastructure before mealtime.). For the cameras, for Michelle, for Paul, for us, Obama is where he is supposed to be, doing what he does. Inside himself, he is somewhere else, where he has to be.
Still, one can speculate. All lives are surreal in and of themselves when aligned next to one another, but the life of the American president must somehow stand separate from the rest, if only because the nature of the profession requires daily duties that border on the narrow line separating the surreal and the tragic. Waking up to a shower and a shave and a daughter inquring as to when that 'hole will be plugged' ranks as one of the most flippant and profound comments a president has made in many years. Whereas most of us prepare for work with a sensation somewhere between indifference and a tiny, spiralling dread that expands ever outwards as the morning unwinds, the United States president must kiss his kids off to school and then proceed down the hall to a small, sterile room where black-suited functionaries blandly recite who, what and where the intelligence services of the most powerful country in the world have harmed in the past twenty-four hours, leading to a sensation in the great leader's stomach that could be similar to a cancer patient being told that there is hope, yes, but of the most fragile and tenuous kind. To start the day learning that one's secret missles have accidentally killed an Afghani family of four (which remains a specualtion on my part, to be sure, but speculation, through its very flexibility, can achieve a kind of moral truth that facts can only leer at), and end the evening by singing along with 'Hey Jude' to Paul MCartney while the television cameras capture your every moment for a broadcast, for history, for the fact that a president's job is to have his every moment frozen in bloodless time simply because that is what a president is for, to have an image we can analyze and judge, forgive or forget, to have that arc explain the span of one's day, surely must make a man sleep the sleep of the driven or the dead. Sleep like a man who has been shown the insides of the carcass he has killed, or sleep like a man who has been given a sedative strong enough to blunt a bear.
We judge a president not by what he does, or says, but what he shows. And Obama shows a driven, intent, subdued individual who maintains a temperament akin to a tightroper walker forcefully but elegantly striding the divide between glory and certain, plummenting death. His smile is broad and white and seemingly genuine, but 'one may smile and smile and be a villian', in the words of Shakespeare, and while Obama is not a villian (in my naive eyes), he is certainly a human, and humans can drift the lines of moral certainty like wood on the water.
I can only imagine Obama listening to Paul McCartney serenade his wife. How strange a moment for the boy from Hawaii! Years ago he was a little boy visting the Big Buddha in the ancient town of Kamakura, Japan, not far from where I now live, and now he was sitting in the White House, watching a Beatle praise him and his wife. All that day he had been dealing with BP oil spills and random missles fired in Afghanistan and God only knows what else the American president deals with on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute basis. For a moment, everything seemed so electric and ordinary: a middle-aged man at a Beatles concert. Forget, if you can, that this was a private show (shared with the entire planet). Ignore, if you must, that only seats away from Obama, hidden from view, sat a man with the case containing the nuclear access codes that accompany the president wherever he goes. (And what a strange and ludicrous existence that job entails! Oh, to be inside of the consciousness of the man whose fingers wrap themselves around such a suitcase on a daily basis! Eternity and armaggedon at ones fingertips twenty-four seven! Was such an occupation even hinted at by him in his high school yearbook? ) Disregard, if possible, the stressed and sweaty people with sleeves rolled up and eyes slouching shut working in unknown rooms even at that late hour, downing coffee and cursing their coworkers who get to watch McCartney sing his songs while they are left with the task of designing ways to minimize the means by which innocent civilians have their heads severed and torsos splattered. All that remains, after such separation, is one Barack Obama, a smile on his face, listening to the music of, if not his generation, precisely, at least that of his era's approximate fellows.
Inside of his mind I imagine Obama returning to that day in Kamakura, Japan. A little boy with his mother in a strange land. Staring up at a mammoth stone Buddha who remains blandly impassive to all of life's disastrous follies and unspeakable (but not unacceptable!) atrocities. The American president must be a consummate actor, and so there is little indication that he is doing anything at this moment other than enjoying the rare privilege of a Beatle applauding his courage and integrity. The smile is white and the eyes are flashing that Obama flash. Tomorrow he will have to fix the oil spill. Deal with Pakistan. Scold the C.I.A. Welcome a group of overachieving inner city kids for their fifteen minutes with the president. Remember to compliment Michelle on her new haircut. Try not to scold the kids so much at dinnertime for slurping their milk, which they think is funny, and he does not. (Dealing with the Russian bureaucracy only five minutes before six is surely one way in which a family dinner can be ruined! Nothing spreads gloom like the gnarld machinations of a former Soviet infrastructure before mealtime.). For the cameras, for Michelle, for Paul, for us, Obama is where he is supposed to be, doing what he does. Inside himself, he is somewhere else, where he has to be.
Thursday, June 03, 2010
CONNING THE PUPPETMASTERS
A brisk walk to the station on a cool but pleasant spring morning is the perfect means to a fresh mind, the brush to the chalkboard of one's soul. The sun is out. The birds are singing their incomprehensible, though melodious, songs. The streets are still empty. One is left with the feeling that if one's walk is true, and the pace is brisk, a certain path can be followed.
But Mailer's words read the other day come back to me, that even gods may be using us as games in their own mysterious game, or words to that effect.
This certainty I feel on an ordinary morning in suburban Japan may very well be similar to that sensation which the pawn on a chessboard feels before he is moved against his will. Who is to say that I am not merely the plaything of a higher, indifferent being? Already forces are aligning themselves against my progress, I suspect. The air is fresh and welcome in my lungs, and the sound of an approaching train is a signal that I, too, will soon step aboard, working waiting for me to disembark.
There is the uneasy but titillating knowledge that I could postpone work's monotony for a day or two, simply by deciding to miss my stop. It is possible to do. Such mistakes do happen. People fall asleep on the train, or drift away listening to music, or simply decide that is enough is enough. Work can wait. Life will, for once, take precedence.
I will do no such thing, I realize. A disrupted life can lead to only more rips in the silk of normality. The train will be caught, and the work will be done. As it was yesterday. As it will follow tomorrow. Such is the unspoken but inevitable bargain I have already made with the gods charting my progress, like fisherman looking through the water at the catch whose crispy cooking they are already planning in the depth and stink of their bellies' hungry groans. Better to appease the gods than await their wrath.
Perhaps, if I'm careful, and quiet, the shimmer and rumble of the carriage will distract the mapmakers charting my progress. I can distract them for a moment with the minutia of train-doors closing, black laptop bags being lugged onto metal rags, the dreary, droopy faces of Japanese commuters beginning again that which has no end but the final one. While the gods are looking down, bemused, at such futile, human actions, bored puppetmasters killing time at internmission, I can steal away within my thoughts and gain control of a life that remains stubbornly my own, if only in my head, the divine ones be damned.
But Mailer's words read the other day come back to me, that even gods may be using us as games in their own mysterious game, or words to that effect.
This certainty I feel on an ordinary morning in suburban Japan may very well be similar to that sensation which the pawn on a chessboard feels before he is moved against his will. Who is to say that I am not merely the plaything of a higher, indifferent being? Already forces are aligning themselves against my progress, I suspect. The air is fresh and welcome in my lungs, and the sound of an approaching train is a signal that I, too, will soon step aboard, working waiting for me to disembark.
There is the uneasy but titillating knowledge that I could postpone work's monotony for a day or two, simply by deciding to miss my stop. It is possible to do. Such mistakes do happen. People fall asleep on the train, or drift away listening to music, or simply decide that is enough is enough. Work can wait. Life will, for once, take precedence.
I will do no such thing, I realize. A disrupted life can lead to only more rips in the silk of normality. The train will be caught, and the work will be done. As it was yesterday. As it will follow tomorrow. Such is the unspoken but inevitable bargain I have already made with the gods charting my progress, like fisherman looking through the water at the catch whose crispy cooking they are already planning in the depth and stink of their bellies' hungry groans. Better to appease the gods than await their wrath.
Perhaps, if I'm careful, and quiet, the shimmer and rumble of the carriage will distract the mapmakers charting my progress. I can distract them for a moment with the minutia of train-doors closing, black laptop bags being lugged onto metal rags, the dreary, droopy faces of Japanese commuters beginning again that which has no end but the final one. While the gods are looking down, bemused, at such futile, human actions, bored puppetmasters killing time at internmission, I can steal away within my thoughts and gain control of a life that remains stubbornly my own, if only in my head, the divine ones be damned.
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
ANCIENT ARCHITECTURE
Reading good writing is like being allowed entry into a vast cathedral whose ancient architecture ascends ever upwards, each ledge and window offering an unseen vista that can be glimpsed only by beginning the climb. (And how forbidden is that particular act! Who has the gall to clutch one's hands around the hooks and ledges of the inside of a church? Yet reading is by its very nature a somewhat unnatural. Someone you have never met has decided to unleash their most private thoughts upon the world, inviting you inside of their innermost psyche. To peer and proke and laugh and mock. To exalt and be enveloped, perhaps.) You scale and pause and look below and see how far you've come. Occasionally, if not often, you fall. You rise and try again, grappling.
That's writing at its best, of course. At its worst, it denigrates the best within us, if only because a shoddy thing, by nature, mocks the notion of aspiration itself. In this bold new age that is neither particularly bold nor new, the net is flooded with writing of all sorts, multiplying like some kind of cancerous cell that cannot be stopped. I wonder if the internet itself might implode from the strain of all those letters alongside themselves, each attempting to paint a portrait of a particular mind, seeking.
Seeking what? There lies the question.
If writing just becomes a form of ego, then it can become nothing more obtrusive or invasive than a needlepoint hung on the inside corridor of your grandmother's house, lovingly stitched together over the course of several weekends at the family cottage. Full of emotion and heartfelt sincerity, to be sure, but lacking the edge and innovation that demands a thorough reckoning everytime one sits down at the keyboard to type or read.
More and more I'm seeing writing itself as a sacred act. (Can an agnostic feel the sense of the sacred upon entering a church? I suppose he can, if only because even one struck dumb by the essential mystery of the universe can acknowledge one's own puny impotency when faced with the collected efforts of a thousand craftsman reaching for more.) If craft gives way to communication, then in five, ten years time, will we be nothing more noble than a herd of geese flying alongside each other, intuitively understanding what the other is trying to say, allowing electronic osmosis to take the place of aggresive intent at the altar of linguistic competency?
Too late, I'm sure. Everyone who can be allowed into the internet's holy vector has already arrived, or is quietly pushing the door open. Which is as it should be. Voices unheard quickly become silenced even to themselves. I just hope that the words on the screen continuted to be viewed as the beginning of a long and astounding ascent, rather than a culmination of intent that has commenced before it has truly even begun.
That's writing at its best, of course. At its worst, it denigrates the best within us, if only because a shoddy thing, by nature, mocks the notion of aspiration itself. In this bold new age that is neither particularly bold nor new, the net is flooded with writing of all sorts, multiplying like some kind of cancerous cell that cannot be stopped. I wonder if the internet itself might implode from the strain of all those letters alongside themselves, each attempting to paint a portrait of a particular mind, seeking.
Seeking what? There lies the question.
If writing just becomes a form of ego, then it can become nothing more obtrusive or invasive than a needlepoint hung on the inside corridor of your grandmother's house, lovingly stitched together over the course of several weekends at the family cottage. Full of emotion and heartfelt sincerity, to be sure, but lacking the edge and innovation that demands a thorough reckoning everytime one sits down at the keyboard to type or read.
More and more I'm seeing writing itself as a sacred act. (Can an agnostic feel the sense of the sacred upon entering a church? I suppose he can, if only because even one struck dumb by the essential mystery of the universe can acknowledge one's own puny impotency when faced with the collected efforts of a thousand craftsman reaching for more.) If craft gives way to communication, then in five, ten years time, will we be nothing more noble than a herd of geese flying alongside each other, intuitively understanding what the other is trying to say, allowing electronic osmosis to take the place of aggresive intent at the altar of linguistic competency?
Too late, I'm sure. Everyone who can be allowed into the internet's holy vector has already arrived, or is quietly pushing the door open. Which is as it should be. Voices unheard quickly become silenced even to themselves. I just hope that the words on the screen continuted to be viewed as the beginning of a long and astounding ascent, rather than a culmination of intent that has commenced before it has truly even begun.
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