Waking

There is a dark nothing.

Then a bright little tweet of a bird breaks the surface, sends waves across the lightlessness. There is another, and yet another tweet, and the sea breaks out in flashes of morning noise.

I want to hear nothing, see nothing, but it is disintegrating.

I am by a pool, readying for a trialathon, forgetting that my legs hurt. There are people twittering all around. The water is green. And my coach is really a director of research.

The nothing is gone. I am looking for a quiet patch.

I am an aristocrat girl in the futuristic feudal world, where the fortunate have programmable wardrobes, and the simple live in the hovels from the middle ages. There are borders in my city, where the money changes value, and the wealthy throw it to the half-mad poor by the doors of the orthodox chapels, turned asylums for the insane. There, a young beggar accosts me. I am frightened. I run through the ghetto, searching for a dark room where the windows have been left unwashed for centuries.

The something is chasing me, its gears of havoc rotating.

I am by a playground with my professor. She has a stroller and I hug her, saying: "Congratulations! I did not know." Then she tells me a secret: someone had discovered a method of efficient rendering. I run in the streets, through labs and university buildings chasing for the paper that had never been published.

No, no, the something is after me. There are ravenous birds circling around it, and the monkeys are pulling at my hair, their teeth glistening like little stars, it is a black hole, the force of gravity is pulling me apart, and from somewhere far above in heaven a hungry voice pronounces: "Me-ow!"

I open my eyes, unwillingly. The static is gone. It is Saturday, and the dreams are pushing me out of bed.

Raven, raven, why do you circle above?

The sky is too blue around you, Raven, kitsch blue. The stones below you are an indecent Hollywood red. You breath in, and your wings bisect the air with doctor's precision, endorsing the silence that floats over the canyon, over us. We can only hear our steps, leading us happily (or painfully) to the surface where the puny human world holds its precarious balance. All that we have to drink is the water that we carry, the only food we have to sustain us is rotting in our packs. All that we have to lead us to safety are our legs, that fill with the sand of fatigue as we walk up the Grand Canyon from the muddy Colorado. Below, the yellow pom-pons of the wild bushes of daisies that we held in our hands just two hours ago flush with the dusk. The select greens of the stone valleys turn deep emerald, the desert flowers open over our path, the night is coming.

The illusory romance of untamed nature... There are no sable-toothed tigers in the mountains, there are phone booths on the road, - only no vending machines or cable cars to take us up. To the overcivilized, this is wilderness. But there are helicopters, there are safeguards, there is no chance that the raven circling above will peck out our eyes. But he still circles with his black brothers, remembering the centuries past, when Man was his brother too, his equal.

But even in this parody of wilderness, the nature appears to bare its teeth to us the city dwellers, us the dependent, the weak, the overconfident. The green body of the Earth rises and falls under our feet, ready to stir from the nightmares we have brought it and crush us, lightly. Beautiful and peaceful the Earth is, as it changes the colors with the coming night. I am ready to die, climbing its mountains and walking its valleys. There is little else to add. I am speechless like the Raven.

And the sin calls me...

My shutter blinks incredulously at the extravagance of the Sin City: "Snap, snap, snap." I photograph the fake gondoliers over the sunny pool in front of the Venetian, the Bellagio fountains synchronized to the music of Celine Dion, the undersized Eiffel Tower and the flamingos in Hotel Flamingo, the original Las Vegas hotel. I walk past the blinking and ringing of merciless machinery of Chance, past the senior citizens, far gone, and the dreamers, and the jaded gamblers, past Hispanic machos waving whore advertisements in the air. And when I stop for a minute to breathe the dusty desert air, I notice the mountains.

They peer down, undisturbed, dispassionate, as if passing a silent judgement on the abscess of sin at their feet. Las Vegas, spanish for "the meadows", is definitely an overstatement for the plain of gravel and sand with dark cavities full of smoke and despondency. This land is speckled by oases that have been tortured out of the desert by the greed of man. And yet, this extravagance has an unquestionable effect on the tame Google engineers. It is like a soma pill, slow to dissolve, never digested, replacing sleep by sleep of reason, drawing one to cigars, drinks and gambling tables. For us, the last night in Vegas was young until it suddenly died. Who would have thought?

Let's see. I played craps until about 3am, winning about $30. Drank a custom cocktail with at least 4 different hard liquors, smoked 1/2 a cigar. Then, fuelled by this experience, ran a couple of laps inside the Egyptian pyramid, on the balcony along the perimeter. And then, with energy undepleted, watched the sky grow pale over the city, sad about its lucky and desperate, all of us sinful to different degrees. The blue of the sky had such a hue of tragedy, and resentment and faith, that I wanted to dance. But, alas, even the sleepless Vegas was at a loss to help me at 5:30 am.

Does God play dice with the universe?

Whatever the answer, there is no denying that to a large extent the course of life is determined by what we term coincidence, or chance. Our mothers bore us because a particular sperm cell chanced to fertilize the egg. We marry because we chanced to meet someone, and divorce because we chanced to marry, get promoted because the right slot chanced to be free at the right time, and we die all too often not by choice of lifestyle, but by chance. Suppose that there is free will, that Einstein was wrong and there is randomness built into the foundations of the world. Then life is a sequence of random events with complex conditional probabilities.

Day to day, causality obscures this randomness: I met my fiancee because we went to the same college and majored in similar subjects. Given that the probabilities of us being born with our particular genotypes is zero for all practical purposes, our acquaintance would be a pretty hopeless bet at the dawn of the world. And yet, here we are, united by the Goddess of Chance. There is little wonder that people wish to conduct carefully controlled experiments with randomness. A casino is the lab of the scientist observing Chance, too mesmerized by his subject to take notes.

With existence so improbable, why not bet on improbabilities? Gambling big puts betting on your life in your own hands for once. Gambling small is like playing house with God. So, the flashy smoke-scented gambling halls fill up with doting children. I joined them yesterday night and watched the chips come and go in a game of Black jack. Nowhere else have I observed so intimately the finality of my decisions and the destiny's relentless hand. When in the loss, I felt defiance as if toward fate, felt that I had to win to prove that I can gain in real life. When in the gain, I felt foxy and satisfied, as if I have cheated fate, proved stronger than it. In the end, I won $6, and an understanding of the emotions on which the palaces Las Vegas were built.

Flying to Las Vegas

"No, no regrets, no I have no regrets," - Edith Piaf's voice vibrates with emotion, resonates in millions of listeners, resonates in me. A life lived to the hilt, without reserve, without caution, a tragic life. The tragedy and talent are a familiar illustrious duo, illuminated by the cameras of papparazzi and glorified by public sympathy. Tragedy alone, tragedy of a little girl grown woman with no particular talents is pitiful, almost revolting. When the life lived epitomizes you, when it is the only way you could have lived naturally, there is no room for regret regardless of your glory: it is as close as we can get to destiny. Yet, a looser cannot sing a song like that. If there is nothing to regret, there is nothing to remember?

I look away from the screen and indulge selfishly in my own tears. La Vie en Rose is one of those movies that are like porn for the soul, a substitute for emotion generated naturally in the course of life. I look down at the darkness through the cabin window. Below, giant phosphorescent cells called cities quiver in the darkness, every minute transforming, governed by the evolutionary laws of economics. I am but one silly molecule, no different from others and just as delusional about my independence and free will. Like the others, I am flying to Las Vegas to fulfill some function in the complex organism that has enveloped the earth. Planes, roads, conferences, mathematical equations - are all accomplishments of evolution. Maybe, someone is holding a microscope over us right now, trying hard to see the determinism in our behavior.

The city-cells stretch their phosphorescent into the night, sucking up the surrounding rivers, and forests and fields. Insatiable. And I wonder from up above, how will this colony of microorganisms adapt to the havoc it has created? Will it evolve to use biofuels, only to cause deforestation and to intensify the greenhouse effect? Will it get scorched, drowned, starved by consequences and, as the result, evolve?

I flew into the rectilinear iridescence of Las Vegas. The nonchalant, scentless palm trees evoked in me some latent memories, and the red dismal sunrise over the hills beyond the city awakened me in the morning. How can I be but a particle, but a body fulfilling a destiny, when there is so much beauty and freedom and foolishness? Perhaps, the happiness I am feeling is only a hormone in the collective body I inhabit.

Story: Encounter with Death

Fatigue. Fatigue like lime powder in the air, poisoning me, clouding the sky. For the first time in months I was coming home before sundown. Everything - everybody - was too unnaturally pale: the facades of buildings and faces of strangers. My face felt naked without the hijab of darkness, and I understood the Muslim women clinging to tradition.

Finally, my gate, my door, my apartment. I walked into the kitchen to deposit the beer in the fridge, and there He was, as if waiting. A body crammed between the kitchen wall and the fridge with a face ashen and sagging, as if it had been laundered, laundered and laundered again. Scraggly strands of graying hair hung over his forehead, and his skull was an emptied egg shell. You could see how thin the shell was where the hole had been broken, and the emptiness inside. Curiosity stronger than fear compelled me, and I reached into his skull with one hand. There were gray flakes at the bottom, brittle like burnt wax paper. I rubbed the substance between my fingers and it turned to oily dust.

Back and forth I walked in my living room, thinking what to do. I was expecting him for days, but not like this. I did not invite responsibility. I sought to forsake it. When I turned toward the kitchen for the eighty seventh time, he was in the doorway. Tall, thin, staggering figure with a body too heavy for him and a head much too light. After some struggle, he reached the bathroom and locked himself in.

I sat down on the couch. At least, I won't have to drag him out myself. It is a self-exorcising apparition, in keeping with the modern times. It was almost completely quiet. No sounds came from the bathroom. The dog barked once outside, and its earthly voice made me doubt the reality. I must be mistaken. He is only an imaginary friend, unexpectedly found. Aloof, at best, but not without a presence. That seemed better than nothing to me. I opened a beer.

After a time, the light outside began to dim, and I decided to get up. Turning around, I found Him next to me. He was still pale, but his skin regained tone, his skull was whole, and his head seemed to weigh as much as a human head ought. A gaze like a search beam reaching into the soul penetrated me. His eternal eyes seeking me out. His ancient, ageless face only a foot away. This being, perpetually destructed and resurrected again like an evil-omened sphinx was next to me, on a couch in my living room. He was loneliness that never rests and never will, an insatiable longing for fragility, for true anguish and truly mortal bliss. How I wanted to embrace his ancient sadness.

Before long, I was on my back. With his all-encompassing eyes encompassing me, I was going with him through the motions as old as death, going through carnal sin, and Little Death, and Big Death. It felt too human, the sensation he caused moving back and forth within my flesh. And dying and living, pinned down by his eyes and his penis, my eyes wondering over the dirty ceiling I thought with horror: "I can't possibly be satisfied with this."

Review: Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters

Written without pretense and at great length, this novel almost assumes the character of a saga devoid of heroes. The fear of boring the reader with details is absent from its pages. The tone is calm, melancholy, almost meditative in its simplicity. Were its chief topic not the trifling and petty social conventions, this book should have been read in a Buddhist rock garden.
This was my first excursion into the authentically Japanese literature dealing in concrete terms with Japanese society, and I found striking the attention devoted to propriety and politeness. Unceasing concerns about proper gestures and polite excuses for this or that taunt the characters, accustomed to the rigidities and subtleties of customs. The novel takes place just before WWII, and the larger part of it covers the unsuccessful miais (the formal meetings of bride and groom in an arranged marriage) of one of the four sisters, Yukiko, who has passed the marriageable age. The marriage negotiations, the accepted practice of formally investigating each other's families through special investigation agencies, and the considerations that govern the final outcome seem unworldly to Western ears. The family considers man's age, fortune, his ability to take alcohol, his family, his province of origin, history of insanity and other diseases in the family into consideration, but it is the maneuvering go-between that tries to sway the family's opinion of the groom.
I am very much opposed to arranged marriage, but it is wonderful to see in detail on paper the society that has now gone extinct. To a large extent, it seems the novel's intention to preserve that era at the verge of its demise. The Makioka sisters are an artifact of the passing age, and Tanizaki shows their struggle with the changing ways of the world and with each other to stay faithful to the traditions of their youth. Only the youngest sister gives way to modernity.
The novel doused in melancholy. After all, its subject is the pre-war Japan that has vanished forever, like the cherry petals fallen into the pond. The story is replete with references to inherently Japanese activities. Three sisters clad in traditional kimonos contemplate cherry blossoms every year on their traditional spring pilgrimage. One sister, taught by geishas, does traditional Japanese dancing and doll-making. Another two practice calligraphy and play the koto and the samisen. The paper and the care with which the calligraphy in the letters is executed merit much attention. All sisters love Kabuki performances. There is also poetry writing, traditional autumn moonviewing (tsukimi, which may also indicate egg yolk), and summer light-bug hunting.
This beautiful age, though, is swept away. The storm, the flood and the tragedies in the second half of the book (miscarriage, death) mirror the shaken foundations of the Makioka life, and are a premonition of the coming doom. This beautiful, pensive novel ends incongruously with Yukiko's diarrhea on the train ride to her wedding.