THE MYTH OF THIS MORNING

Tuesday morning came wrapped in a fog like the one in which Japan got started way back before history, and who knew what was going to happen this time. It was far thicker than the standard fogs you see on all the folding screens, that obscures less important details of famous events; it was a MythoFog of the kind that was there when Amaterasu Omikami and her troublemaking brother got to stirring up the ocean, resulting in Japan, among other things.

The morning's similar potential was not lost on me when I set out from the house on my Mythic Motorcycle and began to roll downmountain into eternity or the morning train, whichever pertained, wending my way through what might lead to a whole other country and culture or who knows what in this day and age, nobody really bothers to intuit that stuff anymore, all the mythothings that can get started on a godly whim...

We have conventional non-mythic fogs up here all the time, living closer to and sometimes inside the clouds as we do, but when we head on down to the flatlands we soon enter clear air, morning fogs hereabouts generally being temporary affairs that evaporate soon after sunrise. This fog, though, had a lot more going on, it seemed to get more mythic as I plunged down the road into the fog of meaning, which wasn't damp like the usual fog, even though it was cold like the hand of history on your neck, with more frisson than those fogs they attempt in the horror movies or that Dickens and Bronte wrote of to such great effect, so in my head there was a Victorian quality blended with some Japanese godplay in a complexity that is hard to describe...

In brief, the portent was major. As I slowly rolled down through the deep gray and blessedly monkeyless silence (they know what's going on), curving left and right, back and forth, all the way down, something in me kept expecting some kind of mythic event. It would have been a lot harder if I didn't know the road, but even so I had to go slowly in case a Japanese deity appeared... Can you imagine the scandal of a collision with a foreigner on a motorcycle, that would be one for the holy books...

Finally I got to the station where I was not surprised to find that it too was in the fog - in fact right at the bottom of the fog - and it too was silent-- no train sounds, no announcements of delays or cancellations-- Was I really here, this was my hand before my face was it not, no sound of other people walking and talking, no godsilks rustling, there seemed to be no one around, sometimes I'd hear what could be a footstep, but who really knows in the early phase of a myth, so I locked up my bike as usual, got out my ticket, felt my way through the mist blanket to the ticketwicket, wicketed my ticket and there was no one on the other side, all was silent, wrapped in the muted strivings of the gods...

I climbed the stairs to the platform, which disappeared before me; I walked on as usual, in faith that there was a platform there, I too became invisible like the mountains in front, the whole range of mountains right there in front was invisible, and the Lake in back, the big Lake just there on the other side of the invisible platform was invisible too... We were all invisible now, a state it is well to take seriously...

In the myth of the moment I went and occupied my conventional waiting spot there at the heart of The Fog of infinite hearts, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, and there I waited in what once was time for what once was a train, but there was no train... Still no train... Then some other hopeful commuters appeared like miracles out of the fog, spiriting past me to their trainwaiting spots; we waited in our collective invisibility.

After about half an hour an announcement came vaporing out of the soup that the express train - which doesn't stop at our humble rural station - was about to come through, the one that, 10 minutes before my usual train, comes roarblasting past at 80 miles an hour only inches from the platform, quite a stimulus on a normal morning...

But I couldn't hear anything, standing there right beside the track, maybe the muffled bleat of one of the goats that lives on the property down there beside the Lake or a goddess was doing something, then came a rumbling like a giant slow pushcart grinding along a hard road and the morning express came pushing into our part of The Fog, rolling through at about grandma bicycle speed, interior all lit up in the foggy dim, the folks in the cars like passengers in an airliner going through clouds, staring out the windows with big eyes at seeing ghostly commuter figures there in the air on what must please god be a platform, waiting for a train... or maybe they were rapturing their way to heaven... Imminent myths can do that to a collective mind in transport...

Our own train finally came pushcarting out of the generative fog - it was crowded by now - stopped before us, opened its doors, took us into its light, closed its doors and rolled on slowly through vapors that diminished like the past as we grew older nearing the big city and buildings became visible; turned out that a well-developed civilization is still out there...

Need I point out that what was about to happen, mythwise, is still about to happen, fog or no fog, so be ready...