GLAD TO BE BACK

I was in LA for an hour or so this morning; glad to be back on a mountainside in rural Japan, I realized, as I stepped out onto the deck into cool air and birdsong, summer green on every side except for the ice blue of the Lake down there, dotted with green islands beneath tomorrow’s LA sky. A little bit of the traveler’s singular homesickness left me. 

I’d spent that earlier time googlemapping my way around several nice areas in LA, looking for places where I'd spent some time in my travels, but those old places were gone; they’re all new places now. I also wandered among areas where Kasumi and Krew are soon going to be living and moving around in for varying lengths of time, starting this summer and beyond, depending on the ultimate selection of scenarios...

Those sunbaked neighborhoods were generally pleasant, tranquil below their palm trees as I moved like a ghost along their streets and walkways, but to the me of now they were no longer places where I would reside... no people on the streets, just cars (Nobody Walks in LA, as the Missing Persons still sing so well), it all had that daytime noir feeling Chandler captured to classic effect in his scenes-- wonderful to remember, electric history, great to visit but not my place to live anymore...

My head was still in those places when I stepped out through the kitchen doorway onto the deck and found myself returned to this forested mountain with cool air and birdsong, summer green on every side except where the Big Lake is ice blue. Glad to be back.

Thanks for that, LA. You’re a fine, fine lady at night, though.

THE LIGHT

I had to slow down on the curve, which was why I noticed the monkey.

It was that curve behind the school, where the road turns sharply to the left on the way down to the station. As I slowed I observed a youngish monkey sitting alone atop the red roof of the school. The solo part was unusual, especially for a youngster, but even stranger was the way the monkey was sitting, as though in complete dejection; didn't even lift his head to look at the human passing by not so far away on a motorcycle. His pose was part Rodin thinker and part the guy sitting there head down, with right leg extended and left arm flung straight out across his left knee in a kind of exhausted despair.

In the simian part of myself, I took a good measure of delight in this. Seeing monkeys in unpleasant situations is a form of pleasure for a mountain gardener. But then my higher faculties jumped in with their righteous batons and moral direction signs and I felt the stirrings of sympathy, because perhaps I was beholding an early version of we humans ourselves, as the proto-human first raised his or her head to look upon at the world around and thought... Hey, I just had a weird experience in my head! What the hell was that? as the first iota of memory found its place, held on, stayed there, and knowledge was born in us: lo, we had perspective - time perspective, emotional perspective - there were tangents and pathways, there were decisions... and so the path led on, to roads, schools, motorcycles...

But this monkey hadn't reached that point yet, he was an early branch of us sitting up there alone in simian despair, perhaps hungry in a way he could not fathom; perhaps he had looked in the school windows yesterday and seen all those furless kids eagerly poring over books and symbols, learning about everything around them, but it wasn't even Greek to him; he thought what are they doing in there, why can't I do that and why would I want to-- then perhaps came the realization, in some proto-human way, that he could not get in: he did not have whatever qualifications were.

Monkeys can raise their eyes and behold the land and its character all around them, but it has no meaning, for they know nothing of topography, have no inkling of geography, history, biology, mathematics, all the human labels for humanly organized categories of monkey-useless things (no doubt an instantly sapient monkey would come up with completely different categories that better suit the simian mindset). The world that monkeys see is just as it is, without heuristic depth or duration, for they cannot build upon memories the way we do (to whatever end), not only because they don't desire to, but mainly because they don't need to. Which was our own status at one time, until it changed for reasons that can only be approached mythologically.

Sitting up there alone the young monkey looked as though he had just beheld for a brief moment what we call The Light, and then had lost it, could not hold onto it, as may have been - indeed, likely was - the case back at our own beginning, so as I passed on by I could not but commiserate, a little bit.

Hang in there, buddy; no matter what happens, just stay away from my onions.

LIFE AS OUTER SPACE

Walking through the slow winter rain down the big city street to work he was nearing the office when he caught on the moist gray air the merest waft of a fragrance that was - gone - then there it was again and gone again, a wisp of a - there was a memory there; it was-- it was a scented fragment of life from far ago; brief as ecstasy it had another time about it, but in the same life-- time can be like that, you can often be here and have been there at the same moment, which can be disconcerting if you spend a lot of time in time, I mean in time, the whole time, not just about time or on time, especially when walking through winter rains later in life on the way to work if you've been a traveler...

You can learn much about time from fragrances, there is a measure there in the mind that knows such things and always has, lays out the incremented timeline beside the incident and says Wow that was a long time ago, it has something to do with... sweet... romance he thinks, some romantic moment in the distant past, when he was newly a young man, about then, that far ago--

The fragrance is and isn't, like a light bulb on the fritz - suppose that happens more and more as you get older, the thought slips in - he can’t catch and hold it, that magic and uplifting fragrance that takes him back to a self he’s lived in before, like those romantic moments themselves, whenever and wherever they were, impact like a freight train made of air, like any romantic moment in fact, was it a moment on a park bench or just walking along a street somewhere somewhen...

He’s no longer where his body is now, but is strolling in the past along this big city street toward the intersection just before the office, wandering among the kinds of memories that come flashing back into life on wings of the air like this, suddenly there they are, those powerful connections that no longer really connect, just reach back into who you once were, like starlight into outer space...

A HANDFUL OF BROADWAYS

While I was going through the routine of making tea early this morning I noticed a couple of leaves falling from the cherry tree in the garden as a bird rummaged one of the branches, and I thought: it isn’t even September yet, and already the leaves are getting ready to fall...

...An indefinite time later I abruptly returned from an unforgettable autumn day in the Bois de Boulogne some time back in the 20th century, and thought: uh-oh…what did I just do... did I dump the tea down the drain or - no - I was on morning autopilot, so that's ok...

Amid the lingering ambience of the Bois, this bit of gentle confusion brought to mind something I hear a lot from and about folks my age after they wind up doing just this sort of thing: that their memory is slipping-- "absent-minded" is the old-fashioned term for it, idiomatically associated with a professor, which used to give it an intellectual cachet it doesn't have anymore.

My feeling, though, is that this isn't absence of mind at all. The fact is, that in this portion of a well-lived life the mind is by now so rich, so diverse in rewarding avenues of thought, the very Champs-Elysees of consciousness, indeed several Champs-Elysees, plus you can throw in some Ginzas and Ramblas and Unter den Lindens, a handful of Broadways and Route 66s for starters (and whatever else pertains in your particular case) while you're at it, and don’t get me going on the neighborhoods (let alone the wilds or the wildlife, rivers, mountains, forests) I carry in me and that render me subject to enthrallment by a priceless recollection or perception at any moment's turn in the everyday, it should be no surprise that now and then, like a little kid at a carnival I stop and gaze, meditating in natural delight until my return. If this is absent-mindedness, then Einstein was an idiot.

It's the opposite of when I was younger and my filling mind was always busy absorbing all the new things there were, sauntering the new avenues of thought and life I was mapping and experiencing - when focus was the essential point - in the midst of each new and newly fascinating experience I really had no lifeplace of my own yet for my mind to wander far off to, the way it does now. To give Gertrude Stein a friendly tweak, as yet there was no there there.

So if you've been enjoying a well-lived life, by the time you reach my age you have a lot of there there. With so many lives in you to live, re-live and be mentally active in, it should be no surprise if you're often in more than one life at a time (especially when in one of them what you're doing has become routine...). So you might as well admit it: you're not absent-minded, you're extra-minded.

If you don't believe me, just visit your Louvre.