Note: this is old. I wrote it in the summer not long after I arrived, and was waiting for it to come together, but it clearly isn't going to. I thought I would post it anyway in an attempt to get writing again. One blog a month is a pretty lame target to miss; I'll try not to do it again.
The dark. It is so
dark around my apartment. Humid and dark
and fishy. Old
streetlights litter the area like broken drinks umbrellas on a sticky bar floor. They are bent and shielded
to prevent light pollution, which would be a nice thought if any of them were
putting out light. I can see the stars,
dimly. At first I thought I saw a comet,
but I had it the wrong way round; it was a plane headed into Osaka airport with
its bright front floodlight on. A
shooting star in reverse, consuming its own plume of light. In the southwest there are strobing pink flashes of heat-lightning from behind the western mountains. The clouds are such
bulbous compact little masses, carrying their lightning curled inside like a
filament. Or maybe each is a modest
chariot for the storm god Suzano-no-Mikoto (they do love their tiny cars here,
after all). Not very threatening,
although I hear he's a bit of a bastard.
At least, Neil Gaiman seems to think so, and since he seems to know a
lot more gods than I do, I'm prepared to take his word for it.
This really is a place of fish and fish-related
industries. My neighbor appears to have
a goldfish-farm bubbling away in some half-barrels by her front door. The whole area has crabs. It had crabs like normal neighborhoods have
squirrels, scampering merrily along the sidewalks, into and out of the open
gutters. One of my first nights here I
stepped on one, I think. Not sure what else
that particular crispy squish could
have been. Most evenings I've been walking
down the sand-crunchy sidewalks to the dock.
Mostly I just stand there, or sit with the sea lice and watch for
jumping fish. I can see fishermen out on
the seawall casting for squid with red lights as their lures. Tonight the wind was whipping my pencil skirt
around, and how is there enough of a pencil skirt to whip in the wind
anyway?
Looking down into the dark water I wonder what it's like
floating in warm suspension, a swift fragile dot on axis x y and z, a tiny
point in time. To me swimming in the
open sea feels threatening; I imagine all the hungry creatures that could
surround me on all sides. But the fish
can't feel that; they have neither imagination nor memory. Untroubled by theoretical horrors, they exist in their single fishy moment,
safe. Their memory is stored in their
genes, acting automatically, protein smoothly into
protein, an unblemished record of survival in which only the successes are recorded. I feel like I expend so much mental energy on
regretting mistakes, criticizing my actions and affairs, wondering what to do
moving forward – none of that has any place in our chemical memory. At this moment we are a triumph.
When I was having an existential crisis this one time the
only thing that got me through it was my conviction that, being already dead, I
had no need to fear death. An event with
no degree of uncertainty, completely and untrendily without quantum, could
surely be viewed as having already occurred.
If every dimension has an objective reality, there is a vantage point
from which our lives exist as a perfect whole, complete, forever, a bubble
floating in space-time. I do realize
that some rather bright people have already thought of this and named it “God,” but I don't think the vantage
point needs to be consciously occupied to exist and be meaningful. Though that would be nifty, depending on
whether the occupant/s were really our type of people.
Note 2: I tried it again as a poem, with little more success.
See, that's what happens.
The pier is crunched with sand, my bare toes enjoying their excursion
two
feet above the warm high tide and I hear the wet slap of jumping fish.
Cold thrill-seeker, ride the poison air
or float there cradled in the hungry
dark,
little silver dot on axis x y z.
Shining point in time.
You
possible sardine of my address
you are the sum of every success, each flick
of bony fan
that kept your great-great-grandfish just beyond the barracuda's smile,
every mindless twist by which your mother shaped
a
silver hurricane's untroubled eye, and mocked the tethered sharks.
All failures have dissolved in salt and carbon.
Only you remain
ignorant above the void
a moment of triumph.
