TIME BEFORE TIME

Culture changes perceptibly even over just a few years, like children and language - things are quickly no longer square or groovy and many of us remember a lush, no-Internet world - but the change seems to be accelerating lately, now that I've lived long enough to have had my childhood seem much nearer the stone age. 

That's how prehistoric the present era feels now for a child of the 1940s, a time that at the time was current to the max with essentials like marbles, yo-yos, mumbledy-peg, trolley cars, typewriters, mimeos and carbon paper, clickety-clickety standup phones with five-digit phone numbers, young men in fedoras, grandpas in derbys and high-lace shoes, women in odd-feathered hats and long dresses; there was penmanship with steel pens dipped in school inkwells with slate tops, there were stenographers, dictaphones, telegraph wires all the way across the nation and teletype internationally, horse-drawn wagons delivering milk, bread and ice, there was no tv, "plastic" was a new word, and the old styles, language (Don't say "ain't"!), culture and mores, social borders-- racism, sexism, everywhere, everyone smoking cigarettes, cigars, pipes, heavy social drinking, normal obesity, litter was the norm, penny candy, cigars, spittoons, the list runs on like time...

I was prompted to recherche those temps perdu when I saw in a film clip an old-school British journalist with all the attendant perceptions, blinkers, mindsets and perspectives, back in the mod 1960s asking the young and sassy, off-the-wall Bob Dylan a rhetorically baroque question, the kind of question that even then was so Edwardianly orotund and sesquipedalianly circumlocutory that when confronted with it, or rather wrapped in it, Dylan uncharacteristically became so sympathetic to the asker as to not be his usual journosassy self, and as I listened to the question unfold I too felt sympathy for that elder statesman of journalism, attempting to speak as though the past fitted perfectly into the right-nowness of his moment, he assuming that he could position this young musical upstart relative to the post-Victorian pantheon of marble-halled literary icons and empirical ideals, that he could understand in his horseback-telegraph-spittoon-historied way what was now going on around him like lightning on vinyl. 

In his long professional life he himself had perhaps at last become his own ideal of the Edwardian journalist, hadn't felt the need to make any serious self-adjustments since then and here he was, speaking from the distant past to the distant present. I suppose I'm much the same by now, how can one tell as one rambles on...

There is always a special preserve for the youth of the day, but the changes since 1940 have been more radical than any before in history (atomic bomb!) (iPad!) and have caught many unprepared, like that senior journalist at the peak of his game, whose name might as well have been "Mr. Jones." 

Used to be that small adjustments were enough-- a fancy new harness, a bigger bustle, the latest height in a beaver hat, or a new pair of spats to get one through a goodly period of modern living, but this acceleration is new to the cutting-edge elders; we must now adjust more quickly and to greater extremes than any of our foreparents ever had to. How does one adapt to warp speed from the penny-farthings of yesteryear?

I trust the mind, though; as it always has, it will find and learn new ways of keeping up with the new tools it has made,  especially in the coming and coming young ones-- but this need for accelerated adaptation is becoming exponential, presenting a more interesting challenge than ever before to elderfolk, who no longer sit in armchairs crocheting or reading the local gazette while listening to the radio in the evening; now every day they dive headfirst into the global infosea, living Moore's Law. There's no shore to information now, which is as it should be, since there’s never been a shore to our hunger; we are, after all, living headlines. 

A most exciting time to have such a lengthy past.

SQUIRRELS' EARS AND RELATED MATTERS 

The old Iroquois gardening rule-of-thumb says to plant your corn when the oak leaves are the size of squirrels' ears, which is a lot easier to remember than where you put the almanac, and makes seeds happier I suppose, but there aren't any squirrels around here, so the old saying wouldn't be much use in this neighborhood unless like me you're from New York and can remember squirrels' ears. But I gave up planting corn here even before I gave up planting onions. I wouldn't think of leaving that tall, delicate, long-growing vegetable at the mercy of certain natural neighbors, having so many times beheld where a lamented vegetable had been growing until but a moment ago...

What got me thus tangentially started on this is that the squirrels' ear thing now relates to the character of my daily existence in another, technological way: when my oak leaves are the size of squirrels' ears, I begin to lose my satellite tv signal. Kind and thoughtful friends say Why not just move your dish? True, I could do that, it might work, for a while. Corporate types suggest that I cut down the damn trees, clear the sky of pesky verdure or just take charge, get real: get cable! I could do those things as well; such thoughts crossed my mind, a time ago. But I don't live in that mind anymore.

What those folks don't seem to understand is that if I do either of those things I would have year-round, 24-hour access to what juridical bodies with corporate taste offer as factual perspectives on socioeconomic events occurring around the world, or as their idea of what is marketably entertaining, and I don't think I could stand that for long.

Pale bean stems miracling up out of the ground; the bite of new radish leaves; the rush of ripe plums: now that's news. More trees leafing, barn swallows whirling, frog on the window: that's entertainment.

MOUNTAIN ROAD INFORMATION

On my way this morning to pick up the grandies for a day at the beach, I as I wended my slow way down the curvy mountain road from the upper unshorn rice paddies rich in rice stalks pendant with their weight of gold, on past the lower shorn rice fields still gleaming in the morning sun, the lines of stubble echoing the curves of the paddies like stitches on an ancient tapestry - halfway down there was a farmer harvesting, streaming his whole field of rice into the back of his truck - in between the eaches of it all I looked out over the Lake that was mostly Prussian blue, with long winding bands of dark sapphire and lapis layered in here and there all the way to the far shore, the entirety speckled with bright sailboats and motor boats, cruisers and yachts, one long white wake of a cigarette boat slashing along in a loud hurry to get out of all this beauty, as across the Lake the mountains rose in sun-stippled granite, above them in turn the way-higher mountains of alive white clouds tumbling upward, ending in the same sheer blue where the silver full moon lives, all below shimmering with the gold that streams from that early slant of the autumn sun... There is priceless information on a mountain road...

PLANT INFORMATION ONLINE

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THE CLOUD RESEMBLES A RABBIT

In a previous millennium, not long after I had first come to Japan and seen how different the news was over here from what it had been back home, where Japan was still not quite above suspicion as an ally (and never will be, in some still-living minds), I was experiencing what every traveler senses at every international transit: that borders affect news, and that the "real" news is local. Every seasoned wanderer knows how the truth changes when that juridical interface is passed, how the victims on one side become the perpetrators on the other. But this was all rather subconsciously perceived by me at the time, amid the swarm of new information travel stirs up.

I guess that's why not long after I arrived in Tokyo I had a dream in which as a dream novice monk I asked my dream abbot the koan "What is media?" and he responded: "The cloud resembles a rabbit," which phrase was floating homeless in my newly alien brain as I awoke. I thought it a dubious answer at the time; but then, I was only a novice alien dream monk. Since then I've traveled a lot more, and have seen and heard more news about here and elsewhere - from an increasingly alien perspective - and have observed how difficult it can be for a local to maintain a healthy skepticism while immersed in a sea of information served up by 'trained' and 'qualified' professionals who are 'on the spot.' It seems most people never travel 'far' enough to perceive such a thing and gain such perspective, so never know how profoundly their own borders alter news. General populaces thus tend to believe the reports of their media, that stand between the seeker and the truth.

Once upon a time, when there was nothing between us and reality, when rock or tree or flower or wind or stream was as real as our imagining-- when we were inseparate from the actuality around us-- our hands were easily water, our eyes easily sky, our hearts easily fire. There was nothing in between.

Long before there were media standing dutifully in our light, streaming through the air in disembodied voices or residing on sheets of paper covered with words from other minds, times and places; before we began to accept the addiction of believing even history was true as told to us, of relying on second, third and fourth-hand accounts of events to keep us abreast of things we didn't have a clue about as we bought into the dangerous illusion that bides at the heart of modern society, i. e., that we actually have a handle on what is going on around the world-- as I say, before all these veils came to be (pay no attention to the man behind the curtain), we saw no separation between ourselves and the world around us; we had as yet created no distinction between the world and ourselves: no palisades of faith, no moats of patriotism, no need for better and better weapons and the right to bear them, no seeds of distrust, no doubting the very air.

Environed as we are now by information, with billboards on our eyeballs and tv in our faces, new stars in the sky and radio waves sectoring our very bodies, all we need is the internet. How crucial it has become, then, that we maintain our skepticism, our own intelligence as we carom like corks down the whitewater rapids of data directed by experts. So acquire perspective: look at a tree if you can find one, and remember the roots; or at least look up at a patch of sky and observe what the cloud resembles.