DEEP FIELD IMAGES OF THE NIGHT SKY IN RELATION TO THE REST OF MY LIFE

Some things you can’t really compare, but for reasons far beyond reach you feel you have to. It can help counterbalance your self-esteem to try realizing how insignificant you are here at the relentless pinpoint of existence. 

On the one hand, we have various local timebound methods of asserting self-significance: one true religions, material possessions, the pyramids and selfies, to offer just a random sampling, but those are small potatoes when you go deep field into the night sky with your mind wide. 

No one can wrestle for long with that reality; it surrounds us with countless lifetimes, a trillion generations wouldn’t begin to cover it. Within your own few decades you feel over time your life’s fabric stretching to its limit; your joints begin to tire at the continuous effort of being, as you physically prepare for your own reconvergence.

Historically, we have attributed these physical life changes to time itself taking a merely chronic toll; more lately in our new scientific version we blame it as well on our dwindling personal supply of telomeres, if you want to stick to that. Plastic surgery is no cure, bionics is no cure, downloading to a motherboard is no cure. There is no ‘cure,’ as there is no disease.

Let’s look up and face it: we are each and all destined to become one again with the entire night sky; what’s the problem with that? What could be more magnificent in scope, more exquisite in detail? What could be a more appropriate continuance to the mysterious yearnings of life toward the stars?

We can all imagine infinitely worse, and often do.

Never Forgotten

The Days of the Dead (Obon) are with us again, as are the dead themselves, the beloved dead, and its good to have them around in spirit, visit their graves, pour water over the stones to cleanse the weathering of the past year, then give the beloved some of their favorite life snacks, leave a sip or two of sake, everyone so busy at these nationwide spiritual tasks during this time of year that once all have returned to their own home towns and their own home graves, the trains are empty. 

I get on in the morning and there are only 3 of us in the car; the streets are 'empty,' the offices too. Nothing much gets done there except the dead-end stuff, finalizing all the done-deals. Apart from the many renowned and WOWy firework shows and the lively nighttime Obon dance, it's quiet everywhere, as though we're getting a taste of death itself, which is a good thing for the living to experience every year, a few-day span of focusing beyond what we know; that's part of life too, after all, that soft wall. 

Living is dying and vice-versa, we can't really draw a precise line between them; sure, we pretend to, we have various stages and levels, phases and definitions - legal, medical, common sense - but we don't really know of a true beginning or end to any of it, the reason for our ignorance in this regard being simply that we haven't sufficient perspective in our merely living lives; we can only weigh what we can prove. 

This what we living conjure up, returning once more to the Days of the Dead: not just the memories of the beloved-- how they lived, what they looked like, their personalities, good and bad points, how they talked, what they spoke of, what they valued, their strengths and weaknesses... We do all that as in a mirror of memories, seeking a glimpse beyond into what must be the truth of it, but that is not vouchsafed to us in the special narrowness of being alive; we must wait to learn what is not forgotten...     

GRASSES OF THE FIELD

In this still evening the air is soft-- yesterday's cold, but with a new warm edge we can feel in our animal selves as the barely rain falls. The long wild grasses now draping the mountainside, grasses that wore the color of dying leaves back in autumn, and in winter - where they edged from the snow - were dead grey, this evening have a remarkable goldenness that reaches from within, a power they have always carried, that isn't life, exactly, but isn't death either - that says in the darkling hours that life is returning, that there is no edge to being: simply wait-- new life is here, has never left.

Even in what we deem death there are things to be done in ancient, hard-learned ways; thus the grasses glow in the early rain: they have evolved, seeded, grown, seeded again for this purpose too, among the countless others, and teach us of our own purposes, in lives we might view simplistically as regrettable aging toward regrettable cessation. For us, as for the grasses and all that lives, there is function everywhere along the line of life-- before, alive and beyond. As in the grasses of the field, the line is always reaching further than we can ever know at any once; in our way through life we are immeasurable, especially within.

Nodding gold in the faintest breeze, the blades go on glowing until all is dark, for now...

THE DAYS OF THE DEAD

In America as I recall, the dead don't come back to visit the living in any organized way but rather choose their own occasions, which is very much in the American tradition, now that I think of it. In Japan, by contrast, where things often seem supersystematic, the dead all come back in the middle of August, when it's convenient for the living to take a few days off.

During these days of the dead, called obon, when the living entertain throngs from the afterlife, stores close and offices are at half-staff, everyone being busy honoring the dear departed because so many more are passing away to ancestry every year that each obsequy must accommodate a greater spectral population, thereby diluting the effect on individual spirits, who this year begin their clamor for due attention on Wednesday August 14, when they will walk through dreams, tap shoulders in the dark, knock on walls and generally get it on in a posthumous way; and in the corridors of merely earthly business, where commuters both dead and alive have spent so many decades, there will be a palpable and welcome absence, for the dead have returned not for commerce, nor for tourism, but to mingle with relatives, drink some sake, party a bit, have some rice crackers, whatever the living will offer, for the dead will eat anything after a year without a nibble.

So the living all visit their ancestral graves and ladle water over the stone and leave a drink and some flowers and snacks and burn some incense, say some prayers for the ancestors, ask their intercession in the matter of say a red Ferrari, sometimes ancestors can swing such things if they have any pull on the far shore, you do see some people driving Ferraris in this life (are there Ferraris after death?), though the ancestors in their wisdom seem to know it doesn't make much sense to have a Ferrari in Japan, where there are no straightaways of any length and the standard speed limit is about 40kph, and where the police not long ago arrested one of the living for courting death in a red Ferrari by driving nearly 240kph on an expressway, a record for Japan, and prime-time front-page news throughout the land because generally not much fast living happens while the dead are around.

If you do see a Ferrari it's most likely just sitting there rumbling very expensively in the long lines of traffic that grow and grow, particularly during the days of the dead because there is clearly a strong connection between death and expressways, where the living sit entombed for hours, idling - revving - idling with the air conditioning on, looking out the windows trying to fathom the reason. The dead seem to enjoy the nostalgia, for it happens every year around this time, the dead traveling freely while the living edge forward on the roadway, impatient to reach the toll booth, though everyone gets there eventually.

[This is becoming my traditional Obon post...]

THE DAYS OF THE DEAD

In America as I recall, the dead don't come back to visit the living in any organized way but rather choose their own occasions, which is very much in the American tradition, now that I think of it. In Japan, by contrast, where things often seem supersystematic, the dead all come back in the middle of August, when it's convenient for the living to take a few days off.

During these days of the dead, called obon, when the living entertain throngs from the afterlife, stores close and offices are at half-staff, everyone being busy honoring the dear departed because so many more are passing away to ancestry every year that each obsequy must accommodate a greater spectral population, thereby diluting the effect on individual spirits, who this year begin their clamor for due attention on Wednesday August 14, when they will walk through dreams, tap shoulders in the dark, knock on walls and generally get it on in a posthumous way; and in the corridors of merely earthly business, where commuters both dead and alive have spent so many decades, there will be a palpable and welcome absence, for the dead have returned not for commerce, nor for tourism, but to mingle with relatives, drink some sake, party a bit, have some rice crackers, whatever the living will offer, for the dead will eat anything after a year without a nibble.

So the living all visit their ancestral graves and ladle water over the stone and leave a drink and some flowers and snacks and burn some incense, say some prayers for the ancestors, ask their intercession in the matter of say a red Ferrari, sometimes ancestors can swing such things if they have any pull on the far shore, you do see some people driving Ferraris in this life (are there Ferraris after death?), though the ancestors in their wisdom seem to know it doesn't make much sense to have a Ferrari in Japan, where there are no straightaways of any length and the standard speed limit is about 40kph, and where the police not long ago arrested one of the living for courting death in a red Ferrari by driving nearly 240kph on an expressway, a record for Japan, and prime-time front-page news throughout the land because generally not much fast living happens while the dead are around.

If you do see a Ferrari it's most likely just sitting there rumbling very expensively in the long lines of traffic that grow and grow, particularly during the days of the dead because there is clearly a strong connection between death and expressways, where the living sit entombed for hours, idling - revving - idling with the air conditioning on, looking out the windows trying to fathom the reason. The dead seem to enjoy the nostalgia, for it happens every year around this time, the dead traveling freely while the living edge forward on the roadway, impatient to reach the toll booth, though everyone gets there eventually.

THE BIG NIGHTLIFE

Last night Echo turned to me out of the blue and asked if, when the time came to join the big party in the great beyond, I wanted to be interred in the States. I must be emanating an aura of transience. Hadn't given the matter much thought, really, though I can't see much need to go on a death tour. Like most Japanese, Echo is frank about such things, and has queried me on a number of occasions regarding the details of my sepultural preferences, perhaps the acid test of expatriatism.

Does one really want to spend eternity in the home country? Is there patriotism after death? Such promptings and the resulting grave thoughts deprive "home country" of all meaning, a fact reflective of its illusoriness as a concept. "Home planet," well, maybe, at a stretch; at least while I'm alive I think I'd rather be here (give me an alternative, though and I'll entertain it), though there are times I'd much prefer to be on Ganymede; but home country-- not much resonance in that idea at best: what does one get from a nation that does not after all derive from oneself? What right originates in a bureaucrat? I am the source of my liberty.

The first time Echo asked me if I wanted to be in her family plot on a hillside in Nagano I said sure, why not, then on second thought it occurred to me that there's not much night life in that vicinity, so I said to put half my ashes there and half in my own family plot back in New York, but then that's way out in the boonies too, so then I thought anywhere in the world or outer space would be ok too, such details are for the living.

I foresee no pilgrimages to my grave. I won't be there much anyway, boredom finds no greater depths than in a cemetery, excepting maybe a laundromat, so the where of it should involve a source of good times for all; other than that, it will have nothing to do with the me I am in life, or with nationhood-- how locked we are in ideas, how fastened we are to existence, even in death-- Simply let me be indistinguishable from everything once again, preferably not far from a timeless roadside stand with draft beer and a good jukebox.