LIGHT AND DARK AND LIGHT

Here and there in the grains of photos remaining from that time you can see the blurred outline of a person, sometimes with a child or even two, walking where the way was once familiar, but now was the bottom of an incinerator the size of their city, still burning through them even as they walked, perhaps to escape the heat of all the nothing that remained...

At other places in the mass of the ashes of a hundred thousand lives turned into wind and rain you can make out the speck of another one still living, bent over searching, sifting in vain through blackened flakes of what once was life, once a place of daily living, where now nothing stood, where all was flat and dark, dust and fragments of death...

After the fires died, first the relatives came seeking their loved ones, one mother searching for her daughter who that morning had gone into town early so she could pay the rent on her way to work, but the mother never found her daughter...

That mother and all the others - fathers, sisters, sons, daughters, brothers - wandered for days, weeks, the rest of their lives in their hearts in those ashes of a city of families, passing by in their dreams those passengers on the train who were charcoal statues in their seats, or those still just alive who wandered also, in search of death that waited only days away, or those who had left their instant white shadows on the flash-darkened stone of the bridge or the building when they'd joined the unseeable light...

All of it on that August morning-- every ash of bone, every unheard scream, every sear of pain or cry for love, every tear of life, every atom of vapor that had been a person-- all of it, is in our voices now...

THE NEANDERTHAL SEQUENCE

When I was a teenager I was often called a Neanderthal by Mr. Rapazzardi, who generally sat on his front stoop keeping an eye on that nice front lawn of his that I used as a shortcut. For my part, I felt that Mr. Rapazzardi was the Neanderthal. Turns out we were both right.

Later, in my college years, I smirked at the academic puzzlement over whether or not the noble Cro-Magnon, crafter of superb arrowheads, pure high-browed ancestor of those strong-jawed subjects of highest nobility, known as "us," had ever, ever deigned to couple with the bestial, low-browed hairy chipper of nothing but hand axes: the Neanderthals next door! I smirked because, well, I was in a fraternity; we were much closer to how reality actually worked.

So all these decades later I was not shocked when the scientists announced that, like all non-Africans, I am part Neanderthal, and so was Mr. Rapazzardi. There have always been certain ancient cave-dwelling propensities, have there not, certain primal feelings in taking a risk, hefting a stone, sighting a wild animal, gathering around a fire, spotting an untrod lawn...

So what does this mean for us modern human folk, this Neanderthal quality so many of us share, even without reference to certain reality tv programming? It could explain some major anomalies, such as creationists, Wall Street financiers and certain folksy politicians, who are torn between the progressive abilities of one ancestral line and the inviting stolidity of the other, between malignant greed and staunch integrity, complexity, simplicity, pride, humility, the list can be found in any "holy" book, whichever from wherever. Familiar mixes that are especially stressful to politicians and financiers, for example, who as a way of life must appear one way while acting the opposite.

No real need at this point in these exciting revelations to mention that I am also very likely a descendant of King Tut, who was probably also part Neanderthal, as are you, maybe you have the Tut part too, all of which means more to me, such as it is, than the Adam and Eve agenda I was heir to, but there you are-- people are impressionable are they not, yearning as they do for admittedly mythical roots, even as they carry the actuals in their very genes, with far more lineage than any mere king.

So now, thanks to science, we mongrels can at last perhaps begin admitting who we all really are, begin finding, studying, facing and accepting the many gifts and glitches we have inherited from the Cro-Magnons, Neanderthals and Denisovans, among all our uncounted forebears - including King Tut, where applicable - and so get past the dark sides of politics, finance, other bipolar activities and evolve at last into the beings that have been trying for so long to be.

THE FUTURE OF THE COMMUTING SPECIES

I've always thought of the morning route I take through the train station in the Big City with the rest of the rush hour crowd as a kind of subcivilized gauntlet through which one must shoulder one's way, angling for the narrow opening to the street so as to get ahead in the mob, all the while keeping an eye out for tangential time-crazed rushers swinging heavy, sharp-angled briefcases, dawdlers pulling invisibly behind them those deadly lowdown suitcases on wheels, or any of the other myriad threats to life and limb when everything's wild - and then on rainy days, fate tosses in those suddenly slippery floors - overall, what you might call defensive commuting.

That was until recently, when the station masters finally opened the newly renovated section, which offers two wide and bright new corridors with safety floors right next to the old, dimly lit and slippery corridor, whose narrow opening is endlessly fed by rapids of rush from trains, streets and subways.

No longer would rush-hour commuters experience the venturi effect as wide humanstreams were abruptly funneled into an opening for three abreast! Now there was new space, brightness, safer floors and faster egress staring the mob right in the face-- yet they continued to take the same old dingynarrowcrowded route as always!

When I took the new and spacious corridors for the first time last week, only two other people were in there with me; ahead of us the mob streamed on as before, right past the new openings-- elbowing, edging, racing, fighting for place, when if they took the new routes right in front of them they could have strolled as they liked: casually or quickly, run at top speed, even pirhouetted their way through with arms akimbo and briefcases whirling, if they felt like it, without colliding with another person. It's been a couple of weeks now, and still there's only a couple of people and me using the new corridors; the crowd continues to funnel into the dark narrow opening with the slippery floors!

Which is ok by me in my luxurious private walkway, but I can't help thinking that this does not bode well for the future of humanity.

KEYS TO THE KINGDOM

As we travel the convoluted pathways of life, asking ourselves the myriad questions that characterize intelligent inquiry, such as "Why am I holding this golf club?" or "What did the refrigerator say?" we learn that some information is more important than other information, as indicated in these quotidian examples.

But it isn't the answers we get, it's the questions we ask that set us so far apart from the apes in the forest, who have no idea what it means to come in under par or fill the ice cube tray or what a toilet is; even the concept of leveraging is alien to them. This is why they remain up in the trees, completely uninterested in the captivating issues and time-consuming tasks that fill our everyday lives right up to HERE.

So when we ask these questions, which may at the time seem strangely unimportant, such as "Why is that shoe up there?" we must remember that there is a reason, even though no one has the slightest idea what it is - professors, popes and imams notwithstanding - and even though the apes may hoot at us with increasing volume from the rapidly shrinking leafy canopy in the illusory simplicity of their monotonous, moviestarless, subhuman, fruit-eating, no-bathroom, golfless, godless lifestyle, just because they were here first.

Do not listen to them. Pay them no heed. They are wrong. Go on about your business with the office windows closed and the air conditioning on, turn up the background music and ignore them; in their simian way they envy your commuter ticket, your shoes, your eyeglasses, your pension, your nuclear energy, your nine iron, your status, your bidet, your freezer compartment your vitamin pills your duplex your two weeks in Bali. You've got it all, they haven't; you can hear it in their lack of syntax. Keys to the Kingdom? Don't ask.