Oasis

The sky is always blue, and the air warm but never too hot.  A gentle breeze blows from the desert in the evening.  Days are long and filled with pleasant things.  Nutritious, well prepared meals are served at regular hours, and refreshing drinks are available throughout the day and evening.   The library is stocked with classics in your native language. Works by Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere,  Twain, Dumas, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Hasek are all there.  There is no television and no Internet, the mobile phone coverage does not reach here, neither do newspapers with their gossip, news of tragedies and disasters, petty political disputes, and their relentless self-congratulatory campaigns for ill defined social justice and goodness,  but the radio plays classical music uninterrupted by commercial announcements 24 hours a day.  A second radio channel plays acoustic folk music of various cultures, while all the remaining radio frequencies transmit nothing but static or silence.

No one among us is complaining.  The staff, who also live here, are young, multilingual, enthusiastic and always ready to fulfill our wishes. A  doctor and his two nurses are on duty should you need care or medications.  I spend many of my afternoons exercising in the well equipped modern  gym, and lap swimming in the Olympic size swimming pool.  During evenings, I read and scribble notes to myself.  Or play a game of chess or Go with some of the others.

From the rooftop of our fine hotel, where we play badminton or relax in Swedish made lounge chairs, and from the nearby hill where we take our after dinner walks in the shade of palm and eucalyptus trees, you can see through the desert mist the distant airport landing strip and an outline of the Boeing 777 jet that brought all of  us 239 here landing gently  in the desert after disappearing from radar over the ocean.  It is undergoing repairs, and when they are finished, in a week, month or perhaps a year or two, no one knows when, and no one seems anxious about it or in much of a hurry, it'll fly us back to where we came from. In the meantime, and I think I can speak for all of us here, we are happy at last.

Metaphysics

Sometimes people stumble inadvertently on deep philosophical truths.  Well, maybe not deep but interesting.  Consider this.  A store has a printed sign on its door which says:

A dog

Carried in your arms

Into the store

Is still

A DOG

Why hasn't anyone until now thought of expressing such overlooked truism in writing?

Or this.  Ten days after the disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 no solid clues have emerged, and those disclosed during the first days, such as alleged ascent of the aircraft to the height of 45,000 feet have since been discounted. The media and the Internet are filled with "experts" and amateurs explaining to the world their sincerely felt theories, every one of them wilder than the next one. (Side effect of popular bad literature and movies.)

One such theory I've encountered asked why the U.S. president has been so "strangely" quiet about this incident, and concluded (it wasn't explained how!) that the silence indicated  the president knew much more than he was saying, knew what happened, and knew where the airplane was.

This inspired me to generalize this theory into a universal observation,  omitting the details of the incident and the person of the current president,  which with time regardless of the outcome of the mystery will become obsolete and irrelevant, and I arrived at this:

Nobody is saying anything, therefore they know everything!

Cat's Life

The cat leaves the house through the cat door, stays out for hours, comes back soaking wet, meowing loudly, as if to tell me about his adventures outside during the hours that I sat in front of the screen or read another book recommended to me by a newspaper critic, wondering what he (the critic, not the cat!) had seen in it that I still don't after 300 pages.  All this on a rainy day and night of the rainy season that has just been declared a draught by the government that constantly weighs and measures such things to make our lives better, it tells us, because what else is the government for, except to weigh, measure and dictate.  The cat leads a more interesting life  getting wet down there a few inches off the ground than I five feet higher all warm and dry.  If we could only communicate better.

And so, driven by some invisible, unexplainable force, I plug in her name, a name that I can barely remember how to spell, plug it into the Internet search engine, for the first time in I don't know how many years, or maybe for the first time ever, and find nothing about her, but much about her namesakes in various places around the world, because her full name is not unique, a doctor in Hollywood,  somebody in New Jersey,  Netherlands, a grave some place unspecified, the buried person eerily the same age as she would have been today.   On the other hand, I am with my unique name, all over the Internet,  I couldn't lie about my age, address or history without you finding out the truth using the same search engine, but she and others my age are nowhere to be found.

Personal computers have been around for 30 years, Internet for 20, and we, alive today,  not too old to be computer phobic, can still be totally absent from the online world.  And yet.  Maybe she's passed away, or lives as an anthropologist with the natives in some jungle.  Whoever wants to find me, can find me, and yet no one of my contemporaries does.  That's all right, I don't look for them either.

One of the few advantages of growing old away from the place where you grew up is that you avoid seeing those you grew up around pass away, become forgotten as if they never existed.

Dream Backwards

Dear J.

              Please forgive me for lying during the time of your visit when we stopped at the vista point of the famous bridge.  You remember that it was a sunny and windy day (it's always windy there),  you were wearing my overcoat and we were holding hands like a pair of teenagers. There were many other tourists there, we heard several foreign languages, constant clicks of camera shutters.  I was pointing out to you  sights of interest across the bay, when a middle aged couple approached us and the man asked a direct question that immediately identified him as American: "How long have you been married?", and I answered "Thirty years", even though we are not nor have been married. (Yet!)  He then said "I've been married twenty eight years.  We're from Iowa, where are you from?", and I answered saying "Chicago", even though I live here, and you have never left our hometown of Philadelphia.   I've been to Chicago enough times to be able to invent a home address and the name of a school where we would have sent our children, should he ask, but he didn't.   Then, his wife, I assume the woman was his wife, said, "It's awfully windy out here," and I momentarily forgot my false tourist identity and told her "It's always windy here," but immediately  realizing my mistake, I added "I read in the guidebook. Fodor's."  Yes, Fodor's. Always remember to decorate your lie with one incontrovertible truth.

Later in the car, you said you didn't like my lies, didn't understand why I had to lie.   What should I have told them? That we had been married and divorced from others, that our own love died thirty years ago to find us again only recently, that we each had had our share of disappointments and tragedies, betrayals and defeats, conflicts, intrigues and despair?  This couple returned to Iowa telling their friends there about a nice pair from Chicago they had met, who still loved each other after thirty years of marriage,  and what's wrong with that?!

I wish we had been married for thirty years, don't you?  But you can't dream backwards.

I send you all my love, hoping to see you soon,

Yours,

K.

Vanishing

Another acquaintance of mine has disappeared.  I asked people who knew him about it,  and they just shrugged.  Maybe they know and don't trust me enough to say, but the man is gone.  It happens all the time.   I'm thinking that perhaps it is my particular circumstances where people vanish, relationships break up suddenly, and that it is only me, my world that's constructed this way.

Because in the novels I read things like this don't happen, or when they do,  readers and reviewers complain about dangling, incomplete plots.  Life flows in literary works without constant crashes, without ends before the last page, without black holes.  In my own life, plots tend to stop suddenly, and when that happens, there is nothing to write home about. Is it just me, you then ask?  What did I do wrong?  What should I have done instead? Etc, etc.

It's different in popular songs. There, perhaps it is the short format that allows it.


Little Richard:
I woke up this morning, Lucille was not in sight.
I asked my friends about her but all they did was sigh

Carole King:

So far away

Doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore?

The Speed of Time

We were reading, my comedian friend and I, an article about Hong Kong physicists who said they had proven a single photon cannot travel faster than the speed of light, thus making time travel an impossibility, when it occurred to me, a science ignoramus, that if said photons could be slowed down (they never said it was impossible), then time could proceed forward as before, while we along with our photons could stay behind travelling backwards in time, the only problem in view of the above finding would be returning back to the present, if we so desired.   Which  remark provoked my unknown comedian friend into asking, "what's the speed of time?".  I immediately wrote this phrase down, the way songwriters write down often banal phrases they hear for eventual future uses in song lyrics.   This particular one would fit perfectly into David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust period.

And then it occurred to me that it is perhaps the comedians who more often than scientists stumble intentionally or by accident into deeper truths.   I was watching an appearance of a well known standup comic on a television talk show, and he asked (rhetorically) about people who sit in the audience of various events filming the stage with their smartphones.   They are watching the performance on a tiny screen, to watch the shaky results later on a bigger screen at home,  and this after paying high price for the tickets, to be there, when they're actually not completely there, he was saying. This reminded me of the time when I met an Israeli man while we were both traipsing through some European city playing tourists, and he explained that he, alone among the thousands of other sightseers  there, did not carry a camera, because he wanted to see the place through his own eyes and not through the camera viewfinder.

If all of the above is not terribly interesting, then know that there is a small proud town somewhere in the state of Oregon called Boring.

Ventilator

You can't be too careful when trying to avoid tempting the Devil into sending your way a ventilator of anger and rage.  A victim of murder narrates "Sunset Boulevard", the 1950 film directed by Billy Wilder,  there have been other movies and novels employing the dead man narration, and I suppose that if one was anticipating being murdered, he could write an up-to-the-minute story, the only problem being how to liberate the manuscript from the hands of the murderer. Howard Hughes and Charles Foster Kane are two people who ended their lives with nothing and nobody around them, and only with piles of money. A diplomat published a novel he spent a period of a dozen years writing, and which, he says, does not contain a sentence that didn't come with great difficulty.

A dream.  No one was interested in going so I went alone, and as soon as I sat down in the audience, I forgot why I was there.   I must have read something about the performers that drew me to this event.  A woman sitting next to me said that during the previous evening an old singer appeared, and she was there.  I knew this man when he was starting up, a subsequent one hit wonder, who somehow managed to stay in the limelight.  She said that he told her he was now a millionaire film director, but I'll have to check if that is true.  The performers then all came in a group of a dozen or so, they weren't musicians, and some of them sat down near me.  They divided the audience into groups and I found myself in a group with several of these performers.   We were shown pictures of regions of the world, physical maps as opposed to political, those multi-colored maps illustrating various characteristics of the land, yellow for deserts,  green for forests,  jungles and prairies,  beige for hilly terrains and dark brown for high mountains.  Each map had the names of major cities printed and strangely enough, it showed its region in complete isolation from the surrounding areas which were printed blank.  We looked at all these pictures and then there was an intermission.

After the intermission we were assembled in new groups, and my group stepped inside a roomy, dark bus to work.   We were given the task to identify the regions in the new set of pictures which were duplicates of the maps we had seen previously, except that all the identifying names had been changed into meaningless words.   We set out to work.  I got the idea to consult Google to find physical maps of Earth's regions and sought to find matches comparing the shapes of the regions.  I didn't succeed, but someone in the group did in the end  identify just one of the pictures correctly.