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...

BRAND-NEW WORLD
 
On the train the other morning I saw a poster for one of the local ski resorts, boasting that it has been in business since 1964. Noting that the poster featured a picture of two women in the style of the 1930s or so, I at first laughed inwardly at the designer's naivete in thus interpreting the 60s, until it struck me that it was I who was being naive: this was very likely the way most skiers now, who are predominantly in their 20's and were born in the 1970s, view the 1960s; they view that quaint, pre-life time period in the same way I, who was born in 1940, have always viewed the 1930s.

Then came the exponential rush that this same realization washes over each generation in its turn, and is what gives older folk that distant look they sometimes have in their eyes. I never knew what that look was until now, when I felt it in my own gaze: it is the look of having once lived in a lush land that is no more, that is now only reported upon, less and less accurately, as time goes by-- the 60s were now ancient history.

That immediate and ineffably memorable and exciting time of my life-- indeed of all life subsequent, whether it knows it or not-- that post-Screamin' Jay Hawkins-Little Richard-Buddy Holly-Elvis rock'n'roll booze Beatles politics Dylan Benzedrine Hendrix civil rights LSD Stones Vietnam war Joplin sexual liberation Doors mescaline college madness summer of love Woodstock Washington protest march marijuana melange was now ranked with the dallyings of Antony and Cleopatra.

So it was exciting there on this morning's train - suddenly become the express train of history - to sit there looking out of time-rich eyes at the world rolling by in a newness all my own.

PUNCH LINE

Windy days are frequent this time of year, now that hurricane season is past and we're down to winds that just blow local trains off their tracks. The savage breezes also kindly remove the rest of the leaves from the trees, but can dry out all those shiitake I've still got out there unharvested. Such are the autumn zephyrs up here on the mountain, where all through the night I hear the hiss of reluctant leaves along the ground, and then in the morning the public announcement far down in the village saying something about the wind that the wind renders incomprehensible, another example of man and nature battling it out in harmony. Such early windy morning announcements probably concern train delays, but from up here I can't really tell.

I could search around on the tv channels for the transport bulletins on such mornings, but by the time I'd find out that my train is on time it would be too late to catch it. No point in calling the village station either, because the semiretired guy who works at our minor stop doesn't arrive there till about the time my train departs, so the phone in the little office would just ring until it was too late for me to catch the train if it was on time. I could call the big central train office and get put on hold, but most mornings I'm fairly sane.

This morning just after dawn I heard that chime-y PA fanfare (Bing, Bung, Bong, Bing!) that prefaces the loudspeaker announcements, then the perhaps male voice saying what seemed meteorologically like "Because of what the wind does to these announcements there's really no point in my doing this, since none of you can understand a word I'm saying, especially you folks far up the mountain, but all the same it's my job, so did you hear the one about the nun, the banker and the frog who went into a bar...." The rest was blown away by the same long, strong gust of wind that blew the ladder off the toolshed roof, but none of that mattered because today is a holiday anyway, I forget what, but I was back asleep by then.

Later when I'm down in the village I'll ask around, see if anybody heard the punch line.

SOUL OF THE STATION

Waiting to go home yesterday at the new train station in the Big City , saw on the opposite brand-new platform a wide-eyed little girl coming up on the escalator, she was all new too, about 4 years old, new to trains and stations, especially escalators, not been walking for all that long, legs still new, eyes still new, a fresh world it was everywhere, she soaking it up, not really walking but anyway holding on to her grandpa's hand there in the crowding rush of tall folks flowing around her, her hair tied in two bunches, one sprouting from each side of her head, she wearing a pink jacket covered in kittens, bouncing around every way she could because walking at just a plain old regular grandpa pace was simply not enough for all she contained, practically shimmering she was with the energy and excitement of having this vast place in her mind, her head turning, eyes looking everywhere at all this newness, skipping, bouncing, swaying, jumping, everything she could manage while holding a big hand and being good at the same time amid all the colors, lights and sounds, huge announcements were there, and thousands of folks hurrying or standing in lines waiting for trains that rumbled in her feet, other people buying food or papers or drinks from people and machines.

There she bounce-marched along at the heart of all that serious train-waiting business, done in mostly dark blues and browns, grays and blacks, with eyes to books and magazines, racing sheets and games, phones and pods of all kinds but she, oh, she was bright and all eyes, mostly in any direction but forward, though sometimes there too, grandpa was her guide so she was free to look and see, not to walk along but to skip along, hair bouncing, way more fun, taking everything into the whole new life of herself.

As far as I could see, she was the soul of that whole rush-hour station, and as I watched her brighten her way through the shadowy throng I couldn't help think how much hope there is after all, so long as there are children, who do for us former children what we no longer do for ourselves, and thus carry on the grand endeavor so many grownups seem to have left behind or even given up on, bearing the true soul from all the way in the past all the way into the future: skipping, usually, among us busy, preoccupied shadows who should remember to skip now and then as well along our ways, however we can, for that is how we once were and still are, at the heart of ourselves-- that is the deep reality of it, as children are here to remind us, even as we wait for our train.

WAITING FOR MY TRAIN

Standing on the rush-hour train platform today heading home from the big city, for the ten minutes or so before my train came I looked individually at the folks crowding the opposite platform waiting for their train (each of us thinks of the train as our own: I was standing on my platform, waiting for my train), mostly working men and women, with some travelers and their luggage, some elders, a few kids, many teenagers, on their ways here and there, all standing neatly in their lines for their doors to their trains, some reading, some chatting, some laughing or staring at cell phones, some far away in thought, some sad looking, some depressed, many tired or simply zoned, some worried--

And then as if I were looking at a work of superfine art in a metamuseum the picture suddenly opened up to me and I saw what the artist had in mind: that each of these people and faces and lives had a long and unbroken history back through their forebears all the way to the beginning of time, that was slipping by unremarked and unrecorded at this and every moment and always had been, and always would be, as long as human life lived on, and that if you left out what was common to them all-- the quotidia, the rote repetitions of daily life-- what astonishing tales would remain!

What a story and stories were there in all those current minds and endless pasts, concealed and unspoken!! Each of these lives and all its moments was richer in beauty, tragedy and comedy than the greatest plays and stories ever written, and what we call history is but a wisp of a vapor of this vastness-- a biased, uneven, selective record of all that has in fact been lived and felt and known-- and what then is fact? History-- our guide and justification-- is as thick as the print on a page, as fixed as the image on a movie screen.

Then came the thought that this epic, of all these people and all their lives (so few of the all that are!), all their moments, countless moments in their length and depth and feeling (how do you count a moment?) were passing unseen even as we stood there, waiting for our train.

THE ZERO ZONE

Ever since my corporeal ballistics demonstration a couple weeks ago, my sleep has been sketchy at best, I can maybe reach 60% depth for up to 4 hours at a time, at least in bed. Which is ok, I can function well on 5 hours sleep a night. Besides, I like the hallucinogenic quality a bit of sleeplessness gives to the day, the sharper, more psychoangular perspectives, the colors and scents, tastes and textures, though I don't like what it does to the noises, which are rife in Japan, where sonic violation is a way of life, especially around and on trains, with events announced in a kind of desperation using big bells, buzzers and other air-rippers, followed by endless fuzzy details shouted via loudspeakers as though for folks who forgot their hearing aids and nobody seems to notice the general passive quivering of commuter flesh but me, which makes this little ramble all the odder...

For me, sleep has always been a gradual thing: droopy eyelids, blurry words, nodding head, book impacting nose, all sorts of early warnings. But as this sleep deprivation has been accumulating, there's been a kind of cryptonarcoleptic buildup that my conscious mind was initially unaware of, because for the first several postinjury workdays when I boarded the train to head back home, sat down in the seat and began reading as usual, the next thing I knew I was in Takatsuki, halfway back to Kyoto. Subjective duration: less than 1 millisecond.

I've never fallen so asleep so fast. Each time it is such a shock that I can't believe it when I return to the world; I'm so surprised, that I can't fall asleep again. Each evening I board the train now, I'm determined to watch myself reach instant zero, but each time I sit there reading normally, enjoying my book, the train pulls out and the next thing I know I'm in Takatsuki. Every train-home evening. When I'm at home on other days I don't fall asleep like that, at that or any other time of day or night. I want to know how I do it.

Through these thrice-weekly attempts I hope to find out how to hit the zero zone at will, like maybe when I'm in bed and want to fall asleep, or when I'm sitting upright in my chair at my desk in the office after lunch, with my head firmly propped up by my hands and busy blue eyes painted on my eyelids. I deeply appreciate the potential of such a skill not only for myself, but for all the world; how much more peaceful would life be if everyone, especially world leaders, could spend more time at absolute zero?

If all goes well, I should be fully healed in another week or two, and no longer deprived of normal sleep, so on behalf of humanity I've got to move fast.

COUNTRY WINDS

Seems like the winds of March have all been compressed into the past three days, both in power and constancy. Worse than the mistral. You haven’t heard mountain wind till you hear it hissing its towering cargo of energy through the big field of winterdry mountain bamboo out front, whose leaves and stems have evolved to dissipate the effect of all that passing power not only by bending as much as necessary, but by bunching those dry-tipped papery leaves together in a million white-noise rattles. Powerful stuff.

For its part, the wind is powerful enough to blow local trains off local tracks, which receive the down mountain brunt of those big shoulders, so you’d think I’d know better by now, but noooo… This morning I headed off to work as usual, the wind so strong I couldn’t even freewheel down the mountain, the wind halting me like a big airy marshmallow, even trying to push me back up the mountain (it was trying to tell me something, I should have listened) till in my eggheadedness I finally powered my way down to the station and there beheld a growing crowd of fellow commuters just standing around in the lobby, the stationmaster hissing through his teeth at queries regarding the next departure.

After an hour of standing around checking the rural graffiti and the state of the neighboring rice paddies I gave up and wove my way back upmountain through the braids of wind to home, whence I called the office to say that unfortunately due to the powerful country winds there were no trains to the big city so I’d have to work at home today, and how it broke my heart and all. At noon the wind is even fiercer than it was this morning, and there are still no trains passing by down there, as I can see from the warm calm behind the big glass doors facing the lake over the rocking bamboo, with a good fire crackling in the stove and a nice cup of coffee in my hand, as I suffer the typical anguish of abrupt officelessness.

Oh well, I can always look forward to heading in on Tuesday, if I should come to be completely out of my mind.

WITH HITCHCOCK AND DALI IN A DiCHIRICO

This morning, Echo being gone upnation for a few days to visit her folks, I woke as usual at around 5:30 and, this being a workday, got up to get ready to go to work.

With my eye on the minute hand as usual on workday mornings, I had some breakfast, shaved, dressed, did some time on the computer, packed my rucksack-- only 5 minutes' leeway, better get out there and wipe the dew off the motorcycle seat, let it rev a bit--

Did so, freewheeled down the mountain to the station, locked the bike, got out my ticket thinking it was odd there were so few bikes, cars and people here this morning, remembered (again) that school is out for the summer now, so no kids on the early trains...

Then I went through the unmanned early morning wicket, but that strange feeling followed me: there was no one ahead of me or behind me, there are always at least a few other commuters at 5-10 minutes before the 7:27 arrives, but today there was no one. Was this a holiday? It was eerie, I felt like I was in one of those paintings by DiChirico.

When I'd passed through the high archway into dimness, walked alone between the tall pale columns and climbed the silent empty stairs to the platform there was no one there either, maybe this was a real life Twilight Zone and I was the last commuter left in the world, casting a long morning shadow on a still canvas...

Was it all really this much of an illusion? What was going on? Did I have to commute today at all? Was this a holiday I'd been unaware of? That could happen, even though there are so few holidays anymore that don't fall on Monday, one of my days off... But even on a holiday (maybe even moreso than on a workday) there are train travelers... Japan doesn't have daylight savings time, so... And where are the trains that usually come by while I wait? Did they change the schedule? This WAS the right time; my watch says... HUH? 6:15??? What the...

In serving as a living metaphor for elastic time, while watching the minute hand I had overlooked the hour hand. As a result, minute by minute I had warped my sense of whenness, all unbeknownst to the attentive individual I usually am, until I'd fully psyched the poor guy out of quiet moments and into a blind rush: I had lost an entire hour in my own head, on my own time!

Having lived ahead for nearly an hour, then been instantaneously retroclocked for the same duration, the resulting mental confusion was interesting. I had been as convinced about those moments in which I'd been living as one is always convinced, at the deepest levels of the psyche, about every moment; it wasn't one of those slipshod things where you mistake the date and 'lose a day'; that's much more clunky and less traumatic than losing a self-created hour, which is more personal and immediate: should I go back home, should I just stay here and wait for an hour, maybe go somewhere and have a coffee, or should I just catch the next train that comes in, it was one of those Hitchcock vertigo vortexes in a Dali painting with my watch melting and me just a shadow casting a shadow, scratching my head while gazing ahead into what I'd thought was now.

I guess it's better I was alone…

OH, THE TRAVESTY...

During our 30-minute sojourn in the 60-years-ago train station where we spent a half hour looking at the past (as chronicled in CHICHIBU YOMATSURI III below), I took a picture of one of the things in the station that fascinated me most: a framed replica of a kiseru (brass-and-bamboo smoking pipe), prominently featured in a severe admonition to the train-riding public to cease committing an egregious and chronic violation of the long-suffering railway system. But first a little explanation...

When we got our tickets for the train and went through the wicket the ticketwicketer, as I said, actually took each ticket in his hand and just like 50 years ago punched it with a puncher that made a notch unique to that station, so that when we handed it in at the other end the wicketer there would know where we had entered the line and could tell that we had paid the full fare, an antique way of trying to thwart the folks who have always tried to fool the train system by various means, such as by handing in a ticket much closer to their destination than where they actually came from, in a traditional Japanese scam perpetrated by the public on the railway system since its inception.

The fact that this scam is historical and has been perped for a long time is reflected in the name it's called, that comes from way back when folks still smoked those edo-style pipes, in the same vein of folk-irreverence that attends so many things in Japan, an irreverence reflected in the folk-terms for those things, an acknowledgment that Yes, we do pull such things off; collectively that is, not individually.

As represented by certain unidentified members of the public, we do work to get a free ride when we can, and here is what we call that process so we can talk about it, all anonymously of course, for I myself, like all my relatives and friends (this said with an inward smile) would never do such a dishonest thing. This railroad station sign is not speaking to me, it's speaking to the others, to the unscrupulous folks who still try to get through life's journey a bit more cheaply, the dastardly anonymous warriors in the fight to keep prices down where they belong... and so we call this process kiseru... after the old brass smoking pipes with bowl and mouthpiece of shiny (and expensive) brass, and the length between them of cheap bamboo, so poetically like the free ride in the middle... There is so much depth of metaphor there, so much collectively anonymous artisanship, so much transcendant wisdom and humor...

As to result in an old finger-wagging sign in the station to that very effect, basically showing folks how it's done while asking them not to do it, not to commit this heinous practice in this way demonstrated right here, that cuts heavily into the railroad porkbarrel; which just goes to show that even the railroad folks are tacitly in on the big collective joke being played on no one in particular, and this is their token way of doing something about this lamentable travesty...