Journey of Morning as Tomorrows | Chapter 1 | Homo rehabilis
It was when at dawn upon a summer day.
In those days, seeking for a definite and actual feeling of Life, I was in the middle of a clumsy and carefree journey, asleep and embraced in a sleeping bag on the bank of a stream flowing through the edge of a deep mountain village. The sleeping bag was soaked in the evening dew, but before I knew it, I had grown used to sleeping in the open, in the calm that I was as a modest foreign matter on the margin of a quiet village, was feeling comfort of the Journey itself, had also forgotten dreaming, and had let my body just be in rest. At the dawn on that summer day, in a brief moment of Time as Life itself, something happened that I will never forget for the rest of my life.
It had begun without noticing in the midst of constant disappearing of the past world called the night that resembled the piles of numerous snows, just before a growing light pale hits my eyelids to say a morning.
Esprit de finésse
However, we need a detour to reach the morning.
A person who traveled through the deep realms of consciousness in search of a definite and actual feeling of Life that everyone has in their own nature, Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941) wrote his maiden treatise “An Essay on the Immediate Facts given to Consciousness” (L' Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience*, 1889), and in it he stated as follows. “To act freely is to regain oneself, to reposition oneself in pure duration.” We wonder what kind of condition does the term “pure duration” (durée pure) or another expression “real duration” (durée réelle) used in the texts represent.
“Totally pure duration is the form taken by a succession of our consciousness when our Self let itself live and refrain to establish the separation between the present state and the states that precede it.” (Bergson, Henri-Louis. “L' Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience”, translated by myself.)
That is why, in order to write down my past here, I refrain to establish the separation between the present myself and the preceding myselves. I mean, it is what Bergson calls “regaining oneself”, but what is the Self that should be regained? The Self that makes up a personality who feel I am what I am is in the first place just one substance. However, for the sake of convenience, we project our Self into a pseudo-virtual** space in our minds, and by giving authority to the shadows cast there, we live in double realities that are separated between the “fundamental self” and the “superficial self”, thought Bergson. He wrote down what is here translated as “self’’ with the single French word “moi’’. It is the English “me’’. The “moi” is usually translated as self or ego as an academic term, but is rather closer to the nuance of the word “I’’.
-----------
- * The title of this book is ordinarily translated “Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness” in English, but I suppose it is not suitable for the actual contents. French word “donnée” means not only data, but also “given thing”, and is related with donation, donee or donor.
- ** The word virtual with etymology of a Latin word virtus is originally an antonym of “formal”, not means pseudo, fictitious or simulative. Therefore I use the term pseudo-virtual to describe so-called virtual realistic.
-----------
After this, in order to “rediscover the fundamental me”, we will recognize the illusions of the shadow that has solidified in the pseudo-virtual space of the mind, deeply address the errors that has occurred there, and want to be resolving it.
A totally pure duration, a state in which the Self let itself live (or be alive), does not mean simply letting it be as it is in an uninterrupted duration of time. The superficial self, a geometric illusion, directs us to movements that give us the smooth impressions like flowing. It is projected in the pseudo-virtual space of the mind as if it were a free expression of own sensibility. That is why, paradoxically, the freedom which people envision is often non-free automatic movement. Bergson thinks separately “free” and “automatic” as follows.
We are stimulated by something and try to follow the stimulus. When such a movement is beginning, it will be depicted over the present state as an extension of inertia, as an “automatic” trajectory that is as it is. The Senses, which are directly given to consciousness, make us conscious of such movement as “willless” and encourage us to do choosing between the inertial movement and “other possible movements”, and he says, that is where the “beginning of freedom” as the reason for the existence of the Sense lies.
Nevertheless, we have lost sight of the raison d’etre of our Senses, have made ourselves into willless automatons, and have walked the path of letting ourselves go with the flow as it is. That is where there is a strange illusionary labyrinth of Numbers, Space and Time. Even those who were able to perceive the labyrinth rarely threw themselves into a volitional movement free from inertia. It is strange, but in the labyrinth of illusion, people seek “freedom” and voluntarily become automatons.
“Free action is rare, even on the part of people who are most accustomed to observing themselves and reasoning about what they are doing. [...] Our daily actions are far more inspired by the invariable images with which our feelings adhere than by the infinitely mobile feelings themselves. [...] My act follow the impression, even if my personality is not interested in it. Here I am an automaton with conscious, because it is at all an advantage for me to be so.” (Bergson. “L' Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience”, translated by myself.)
Our conscious life cannot easily escape from juxtapose-thinking, which is dependent on the concept of number, Euclidean geometry, and the concept of homogeneous space, and which tries to grasp things in a schematized manner. Bergson says, “Every clear concepts of numbers involves visual images in space.” Everyday surface consciousness perceives all things as geometric images floating in a pseudo-virtual homogeneous space created by consciousness. Bergson regarded this kind of perception as an erroneous translation, an illusion, caused by treating phenomena numerically without making a clear distinction between “quality” and “quantity”.
Even when we think about things, especially the Time, we unfold them in geometric space, juxtapose them as images with a certain “extent” as past, present and future, and treat them as homogeneous things. At there, inevitably, the original “quality” of things has been fully relativized, and the “quantity” of phenomena will becomes an only problem. Thus the Time loses the sensations that are something directly given to consciousness, the nuances as characteristics of diversity, and becomes an empty “specter of space” without will and actuality, he says.
The word “qualité” here refers to the quality, characteristic, essence, and other elements that can be used to identify what a phenomenon is exactly as it is. And “quantité” (quantity) represents a conceptual element that enables measurement by treating things homogeneously without the actual nature of the existences in what is just as itself is. In the usage of “quality = value” which treats “quality” as a standard for judging whether something is good or bad, there is a striking example of a mistake in which quantity erodes quality and makes us lose sight of the essence of good or bad.
Bergson uses the word “durée” to explain the “quality” as the “succession” that cannot be separated spatially, and the word “étendue” to explain “quantity” as the “extent” in a pseudo-virtual homogeneous space. If we think of his “étendue” in relation to “mass”, which also means “extent” in English, the illusion that arises from mistranslating quality into quantity is can be said that it is the automatic movement of consciousness in which we convert all things into homogeneous spatial energies.
The mass (spatial energy) can certainly be measured, but it is a pseudo-virtual numerical value generated by the measurement, and it exists only in uncertain figure before it is measured. In the Time filled with the actual natures, everything is purely sustaining, and its essential figure is immeasurable. In other words, according to the words of the quantum mechanics, “states can only be expressed by probabilities, rather they are superposition of various states.”
German theoretical physicist Heisenberg showed that the world of invisible particles halfly rejects geometric observations based on the premise of homogeneous space, by the “Uncertainty Principle”. From counting on the fingers to the mechanism of modern electronic devices, the method of quantifying and calculating things is called “digital”, but the figure of things sampled and quantized in this way is only a pseudo-virtual thing, and no matter how much numerous informations are added, there will be errors from the original state of things. The errors due to quantization are usually pseudo-corrected to draw a smooth curve, but the curve is purely simulative and differs from the actual state of things. When we forget the existence of that errors, we let ourselves get lost in the labyrinth of illusions. Frenchman De Broglie, who contributed to the development of quantum theory at the same time as Heisenberg, referred to the Uncertainty Principle in his book “Material and Light” (Matiére et lumiére, 1938) and wrote:
“The more precisely we try to determine the [particle’s] position, the more uncertain its state of motion. Conversely, the more clearly the state of motion of the particles is determined, [...] it becomes impossible to calculate the particle’s position certainly.” (De Broglie, Louis. “Material and Light” retranslated by me from the Japanese translation by Yoichi KONO.)
Human senses and fine particles have similar properties, but I have no idea what that means for sure. However, it is the “esprit de finésse” that theoretical physicists show when they deal with the invisible things such as fine particles, that we also want to keep in our minds when seeking the invisible realms of Sense which is something directly given to consciousness.
Our sensations are “immense” things that cannot be contained within the framework of numbers or languages. The Chinese word “無量 muryō” is a translation of the Sanskrit word “amita” or “amida”, which means immeasurable, boundless and immense. And the name of Amida in Buddhist scriptures is said to represent “beautiful scenery where there is good fortune”. As soon as you project it onto a homogeneous pseudo-virtual space in an attempt to measure the world of sensations, your attempt will affect the sensations themselves and endow them with completely another new forms.
Our sensations, emotions and ideas are mutually eroding, and each of them equally occupies the whole of our hearts as something different from each other. Bergson grasped “what is immediately given to consciousness” as such a resonative fraternization of life that cannot be separated, a symphony in which the diversity of heterogeneous things equally embraces each other as one world itself. It is the “superposition” of countless sounds that reverberate in a scenery that is not a space, and also the “ecosystem of forest in the mind” full of substantial differences, where diverse things are equally sustained as a single environment.
To be in a state of pure sustaining is to recapture the interrelationships of these immeasurable sensations, and by perceiving the state of everything directly given to our consciousness, we are necessary to awake our own will here. (Bergson continues the passage on “pure duration” quoted at the beginning as follows.) “To do this, it does not require total immersion in shifting sensations and ideas. For in such a case, on the contrary, the Self should end up ceasing to duration. However, it is also not necessary to forget the preceding states of the mind. When remembering these states, the Self will not juxtapose them beside the present state like just juxtaposing one point against another, like when you recall the constituent notes of a certain melody as they are something fused together in so-called oneness, it is enough to organize the preceding states and the present state. [...] The ensemble of these notes, while each parts of the body are certainly distinguished, can be likened to a living thing that the parts are mutually permeating by the very effect itself of the solidarity with each other.”
Life as Conversations
I thought it was the sound of wind.
Certainly, there was also a whisperlike dry tone when the wind-swayed tips of branches are touching from each other. Yet then, my ears were alerting me; that is not what my heart was trying to respond. I answered the call and gave them all my consciousness. I was able to do it then. I don’t know why.
“Someone is calling someone else,” my ears let me know.
My consciousness told my ears that it was the singing of bugs. Neither my ears nor I knew what the name of whom the voice was. However, that didn’t matter now. My ears slowly differentiated the wavelengths. As they did so, they realized that someone else was calling another one.
“We hear a singing of a bird, and then a voice of a bird again.”
My ears, which heard the difference from the wavelengths, told me that the two voices were calling each other. In the meantime, also someone called someone else, and a voice responded. To my ears, there are too many sounds to differentiate one from the others, the singings of bugs, and the voices of birds will tell something in the nuances of each tones, therefore needless to differentiate them, so many different sounds are born and disappear on each waves of the Time. Every sound begins at its own time and ends at its own time. However, with their so many conversations in which it seems that the calls and responses will never end, I feel a mysterious sense of Time, that the endless back-and-forth phases of time are calling to each other. And just I felt wishing to gift it someone, so passed it, and another one wish to gift it me, so pass it, I received it, so pass it, receive it, and so pass it...who is wishing to let me, bugs, and birds do this?
My consciousness was trying to convey it to me as a single passage of words at that time. This sparrow called out to the other sparrow because he wished to love her, and that sparrow responded with body trembling because she wished to love him. All the correspondences became “love as conversations” and were trembling to give birth something named “here now”. And if I am here now, the love will be passed on, and from being passed on, “I” will continue to be given born. I was telling myself that “I” was born in this way. In response to the call, I will continue to remember so many myselves immeasurably. The immeasurable calling voices of the birds awakened the immeasurable called voices of the birds, while they continued to recall themselves, was trembling, as continuing to give birth to me here.
“The sound of wind,” my ears call me.
“Don’t forget that it was the sound of wind which called you here. We don’t know now why we didn’t tell you to respond meekly to the wind’s call. However, if we hadn’t called on you to do so at the time, you might never have come here now.”
Someone was calling me. My modest ears stopped talking.
My two eyes gently told me that someone had been tapping my eyelids for a long time. I can feel the glowing light pale behind my eyelids. I opened my eyes, and saw.
Something slowly changed its appearance to the “World” named the blue sky, and had caught me...
Now, not anymore, the symphony of love as conversations of bugs and birds has end up vanished completely into someday somewhere, and the familiar voices of cicadas are solemnly playing the fugue of their remnant.
Immense Journey
“There are exceptional hours, very mysteriously privileged moments,”
Mahmoud Saadi, Pierre Mouchet, Mahmoud Waldo Ali, and... Calling themself these several fictitious names, a strange travel writer, who traveled in the late nineteenth-century on Maghreb — the frontier of Northwest Africa — that means “the land where the sun sets” in Arabic, would politely start telling close to the readers' ears. Then, while showing a bewildered appearance that hesitate about recalling the scenery they themself saw, they writes:
“In these fleeting moments, the details necessarily escape us and we can only see the whole of things... Are particular states of our souls, or special aspects of the places, always unconsciously and in passing seized?
I don’t know...” (Eberhardt, Isabelle. “Écrits sur le sable”, translated by myself.)
She was given the name Isabelle Eberhardt and was born illegitimate in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1877. Her life of twenty-seven years, in its chronological shortness and richness of events that occurred vividly one after another, aroused people’s interest in biography, but we would like to follow her itinerary that is inexplicably straight forward, carefully avoiding paths which lead us into the topics of “quantity”.
In the preface for the English translation of her posthumous collection, “The Oblivion Seekers and other writings” published in 1972, the American novelist Paul Bowles (1910-1999), who also traveled through Maghreb where brimmed with sands and the sky, Morocco in North Africa, and later lived there until the end of his life, says:
“Her life seems haphazard, at the mercy of caprice, but her writings prove otherwise. She did not make decisions; she was impelled to take action. Her nature combined an extraordinary singleness of purpose and an equally powerful nostalgia for the unattainable. Over the years the goal imperceptibly changed from the idea of simple escape to the obsession of total freedom, only later manifesting itself in a quest for spiritual wisdom through the discipline of Sufism.” (Bowles, Paul. Preface for “The Oblivion Seekers and other writings”, 1975.)
When we think about the total freedom, we are once again stopped by Bergson’s word “real duration” (durée réelle). Although he used the words “pure duration” and “real duration” differently depending on the occasion, he did not clearly state the difference in nuance of each words.
Whenever I try to use words like total, perfect, complete, real, and true, I always feel a kind of restlessness. So I consider; what is this uncomfortable feeling? Then, I’ve been inspired, it might be that in mathematically quantitative point of view, these words contain the idea of 0 itself. In other words, the number 0 exists in the center of the coordinate axis as the origin O in the geometrically homogeneous space, but once we try to lead our consciousness into the midst of “pure duration”, the number 0 should lose its topos itself; thus I would like to hypothesize here that we may feel something is wrong by unconsciously realizing the convinced sense of danger about losing the topos where there we actually belong.
“Her wisdom lay in knowing that what she sought was unreachable,” Bowles reviewed of Eberhardt.
Nevertheless, I also suppose that both he and she, compelled to act by something not themselves, were searching for something which said by Edgar Allan Poe “dreaming dreams no mortal has ever dared to dream before” (The Raven, 1845) , towards far away anywhere, the distance beyond somewhere not here. What they pursued in the distance was the “something” itself that spurred them to their actions, the dream that is called sometimes as despair and sometimes as hope.
“What makes the hope so intense is the future, which we have at our disposal as we like it, that appears to us at the same time in a multitude of forms, as something equally pleasant and equally possible. Even if the most desired of them comes true, we will have to sacrifice the rest, and have lost a lot. The idea of the future, fraught with an infinity of possibilities, is therefore more fruitful than the future itself, and that is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, to dream than to reality.” (Bergson. “L' Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience”, translated by myself.)
The “idea of the future”, spatially depicted as an infinitely branching possibility, is a pseudo-virtual thing, a dream that can never be dreamed, and does not exist in the Time that is non-spatial thing in the essential sense. Time is not a spatial extent that branches endlessly, but exists as an immeasurable and immense pure texture. Through his own experience, Bergson simply expresses that there is no existence of the unnatural branching called “infinite possibilities” with the following sentence.
“I hesitate between two possible actions X and Y, and I go from one to the other in turn. [...] The common sense [...] will imagine a figure of Self which, after having passed through a series MO of conscious facts, arrived at the point O, and sees in the face of two equally open directions OX and OY. [...] This figure does not show me the action in progress, but the action that have accomplished. Don’t ask me if the Self, having passed through the path MO and having decided on X, could or could not opt for Y: I would answer that the question is meaningless, because there is no line MO, no point O, no path OX, and no direction OY. [...] Since freedom must be sought in a certain nuance or quality of the action itself, and not in a relationship of this act with what it is not or with what it could have been.” (Bergson. “L' Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience”, translated by myself.)
There is no origin O that contains spatial branching in the Time which will be durating. The present is the result that caused of the future chosen by one’s will, and exists as a duration towards the future directed by the will. Contrary to the recognition on common sense, Bergson grasped the Time in this way. Choices do exist, but choices made by will do not lead to the illusion of the spatial branching. It contains the fundamental question of what “will” is.
On August 3, 1899, at 7 pm, Isabelle Eberhardt arrived in El Oued, a town in the Souf region of Algeria, and she wrote down what she received as a decisive revelation at her privileged moment, that was the evening’s “harsh and splendid” desert landscape, in a small travelogue titled “In the Land of Sands”.
Two years before her revelation, in 1897, Eberhardt formally converted to Islam in Algeria. Bowles wrote that as a Muslim she accepted both fortune and misfortune with equanimity, following the teaching that “everything had written down as destiny in the beginning of time.” Was there freedom in the teaching that she chose? The notions of will, freedom and destiny would be all condensed as being a “harsh and splendid” appearance in the midst of her split-second choice.
The straight road she wrote down certainly represent the figure of what Bergson calls “pure duration”, of the present existence itself as a result that caused by the future. She kept walking towards her moment of decisive revelation; because she will keep going straight, therefore the moment of her revelation have gone just decisive. Was it the trajectory of her will, or was it an orbit drawn by the geometry of a dream indicated by a destiny that does not in first place existed? Her words “I don’t know...” would hold just barely her will, and ourselves, tight to the Now.
For Bergson, who carefully chose and wrote down the words, shunning the utopian, nostalgic perception of the narrator of fate (“determinist”) and the advocate of perfect freedom (“defender of liberty”), the intuition of “pure duration” was a naive interpretation of life rooted in the direct recognition that the will itself to be here and now is freedom itself. Freedom is just a one-time, unique moment that can never be repeated, and because it refuses all our definitions, all determinism and the geometry of dream depicted by destiny vanish at that very moment. Nevertheless, he was also one of the travelers who seek the true freedom.
“Our character changes imperceptibly every day, and our freedom would suffer from it, if these new acquisitions came to be grafted onto our self and not to merge into it. However, as soon as this fusion takes place, we must say that the change which has occurred in our character is indeed ours, that we have appropriated it as our own. In a word, if we agree to call free any act which emanates from the self and from the self alone, the act that bears the mark of our personality is truly free, because our self alone will claim paternity.” (Bergson. “L' Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience”, translated by myself.)
Bergson’s definition of freedom holds true if our Self consists entirely of only Us itself. However, it is sure unable to define freedom, therefore that is why we are not necessarily the only ones who make up our own “personality”. The individual is a sustaining diversity filled with the actual differences that forms one “ecosystem”, and the “mark of personality” can authorize the freedom of act, but can’t prove the freedom of liberty. There arises a freedom that is not itself, a self that is not oneself. That is an imaginary origin O, and does not exist actually. No mark can prove our true freedom.
An illusion of the origin O that emerges like a dream from the image of the words total, perfect, complete, real, and true — the idea of 0, is utopos, an "utopia" that could be only found in pseudo-virtual homogeneous space, and as the word itself suggests, that does not exist here now.
“If even once we say at heart Namo Amida Buddha, there is no one does not ascend on Lotus.” (Hitotabi mo, Namu Amida Butsu to, iu hito no, Hachisu no ue ni, noboranu wa nasi.)
The above Japanese Waka poem was written on a sign that stuck into the ground on the outskirts of Heian-kyō — the central city of medieval Japan — by a legendary buddhist Kūya the Sage on the Road, who is said that he gone through the city around and around, dancing with joyfulness and jumping like sparrow. He lived with people on the street in the horizon of actual feeling beyond the legend, that is not in seeking for the solemn paradise of afterlife depicted in the sutras, but in the midst of the “beautiful scenery where there is good fortune” expressed by the name of Amida. In other words, it seems for me that he lived on the immense sense as feeling the “無量 muryō”: as long as we have the heart to lead our consciousness into the midst of “pure duration”, life itself will be a paradise and free.
Freedom as a definite and actual feeling of Life that everyone has in their own nature is, what is giving birth the “here now” in the midst of the just one-and-only-time act, born from the will to be exactly freedom itself. That is what cannot be quantified because it is irreproducible, and the existence can be barely proven only by embodying it on our own act. The very moment any paradise can be grasped, it begins to spill out of the hand like particles of sand fleetly.
One year after the mysteriously privileged moment — the revelation — , in 1900, Eberhardt stepped on the land of El Oued again at the end of an itinerant. Her long-awaited second stay was so dreamily beatitude times that she felt “I would like to make here my homeland if possible.” However, an incident that occurred the following year triggered her to be banished from her dream home, the Promised Land where she had arrived at. She wrote, “We will be back soon, and this time we will never leave this land,” about El Oued, but she could never returned to there. And she was writing, that she foresaw this banishment together with her lover as an inevitable event, with a following stroke of the pen:
“We cried childishly foreseeing well, alas! in a sudden and common intuition, all the misfortunes which were to overwhelm us months later... Oh, here is unfathomable mystery of these human prescience, of these vague presentiments, without any material and reasonable foundation, which nevertheless never deceive us!...” (Eberhardt. “Écrits sur le sable”, translated by myself.)
Was the “destiny” she foresaw something that “had written down at the beginning of time”? Rather, the very moment she had accepted it as “destiny”, it would became something “had written down at the beginning of time”? Here again, the path she wrote certainly shows us what Bergson calls “pure duration,” the present and the past that exist as the result caused by the future.
“He left for happiness, at least he believed so, and I for my destiny.
Now I have walked away, and I feel my soul becoming healthier again, naively open to all the joys, to all the delicate sensualities of the eyes and the dream.” (Eberhardt. “Écrits sur le sable”, translated by myself.)
She chose a vague impression as “destiny” and began to walk. As she begins to walk, her vague impression is transforming into something “had written down at the beginning of time”. The future thus becomes the cause of the past. Yet, what was it that gave her the vague impression, and tried to create her fictitious destiny? A little while ago of her death, she wrote it down in these words:
“What speaks in me, what worries me and what will push me on the roads of life again tomorrow, it is not the wisest voice of my soul, it is this spirit of agitation for which the earth is too narrow, and who has not been able to find his universe within himself.” (Eberhardt. “Écrits sur le sable”, translated by myself.)
We have a strange “spirit of agitation” (esprit d’agitation) in our bodies. Or we can call it a “dream”. Dreams exist within our bodies. And dream cannot find the universe that is immense and immeasurable, within dream itself: dream seeks an infinite “extent” that can not exist, by the error that the dream itself fallen into. That’s why it confuses us, her, and drives people to the true, or total freedom — the idea of 0.
Even though she knew it as “what is unreachable”, Eberhardt sought true freedom, in 1904, was engulfed by a sudden flood of a Wadi, her body and mind crushed by the rubbles, along with the manuscripts she had written, ended up being scattered about the earth of sand on Maghreb. Was she able to reach what she had devoted her life to seeking? I don’t know... However, like her, as one of the travelers seeking a definite sense of own life, I wish here that she would have reached her own nature. Then, what we wish will come.
“Such hours, such intoxications, felt once, by a unique chance, will never be found again...”
A Voice from Distant Beyond
Here is inside the ears of mine, where there the cicadas are still singing.
A long time ago now, I was sitting on a low concrete wall, smoking a cigarette in a small park next to the circular railway line in the city center. It was late at night, but the large brown cicadas were screaming loudly so as not to be overwhelmed by the roar of trains. It seems that this summer is one of the years when a large number of the cicadas occur once every few years. In this middle of the nigh... so I muttered in my mind and quit.
I lay down on the concrete wall. Looking up, the sky was usual strange purple colored. I was sure they, like me, have their body clocks messed up in this city of electric lighting. Here is so bright, that everyone forgets the night itself.
Suddenly I heard someone’s footsteps, so I raised my body.
“Good evening,” said a man, stopping a few steps ahead of me. “Are you going to work now?”
I couldn’t understand the meaning for a while.
It just crossed my mind, the sight of homeless people who were gathering near this park early in a morning and quietly exchanging words. I had heard from an acquaintance that they would be put in a car from there and go to work somewhere. In retrospect from now, their jobs might have been workers at the remote seaside nuclear power plants, to keep the electric lights of cities glittery and to color the night sky purple. Yet, at this time, I had no idea that such a job existed.
“No, I’m on my way home from work,” I replied.
The man said, I see, thank you for your hard work, until this hour, and so on, while swaying his gaze across the hedges here and there in the park. The air of the city was letting me know that morning was approaching here.
“Do you run just every morning?” I asked.
The man had an expression as if he himself was some kind of secret.
“I’m checking around here, whether yet warm or not.”
“?”
“Like this,” said the man, putting his palm to his forehead. “I check whether yet just warm or not, those people are.”
At this moment, I was pulled back into the midst of the Night.
I felt in my palm a texture of the flesh of forehead of a dead homeless person who had been completely cold, and I shivered.
When I was really young, I lived on the top floor of an apartment complex in the suburbs — i still remember that one day an older man who lived on the floor below passed away. When i was taken to the funeral held at the meetinghouse, i was staring at the older man in a box with a strange feeling as he closed his eyes and be enclosed with white flowers. It seemed like beautiful to me. i didn’t cry. I now think that the concept of death had not yet been born in my breast at that time.
In the fall of my 21st year, the bar mom who loved me died of cancer. The sight was also beautiful when she died, but I was just crying in silence. I couldn’t help but feel sad. The older man also loved me, and now I can even faintly recall it. If so, what changed in me?
At this time, I was living in the present, and there ware in my mind two emotions that swirled within me, trying to take me away from here now to someday somewhere.
One a nonchalant generosity towards life and death: in the ever-changing flow of the here now, nothing that ends or begins can be found. While another the someday-somewhere for the living mortal: that is all the strange humanistic sorrow which be brought to my heart by the solemn demise, like idea of 0. These two feelings barely attach me, who dwells in the night, to the morning sunlight of tomorrows. Where on earth will I do arrive at?
“The conception of a homogeneous empty medium is something different extraordinarily, and seems to require us a kind of reaction against this heterogeneity which constitutes the very basis of our experience. [...] We have the special faculty of perceiving or conceiving a space without quality. [...] We know two realities of different orders, one heterogeneous, that of sensible qualities, the other homogeneous, which is space. The latter, clearly conceived by human intelligence, puts you in a position to make sharp distinctions, to count, to abstract, and perhaps also to speak.” (Bergson. “L' Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience”, translated by myself.)
The man in the park bowed and left in front of me. While I followed the figure with my eyes, he stepped slowly into the grass between the trees — perhaps he too, like Bergson, was a traveler between two realities. He spoke to me, so I can talk to you like this. If my words reach you, the world is one.
That’s exactly why our journey will continues leisurely.
We are all “homeless” when we are going the road of the journey called now, I’ve always thought so. However, is it really so? My own sensations certainly reverberate in the midst of the spectacle that is not space, that named as Time. Still, I suppose that there were times when someone existed in front of me and a “home” appeared as a non-homogeneous space where the sensations of each existences superposed.
I can still remember that I met a man at some point, not so long ago from now. Then, as a lonesome traveler, he told me about his youth clumsily, that he searched for a place to where he should really end up returning, thus in the wilderness facing the farthest sea in the north of this country, had no house, spent his very time just admiring the scenery.
His story reminded me of something beyond the scenery that the story depicted.
That’s why I can always remember the something beyond the sceneries.
I wonder if he was able to see the “beyond the scenery” that I saw. At that time, in front of my eyes, was he, whose appearance looked like a beggar itself, an eternal traveler who had lost his place? And what about myself? I heard someone’s voice coming from the distance beyond the Time, quietly asking that question in my ear and disappearing, so I stopped several times and turned around. And I will feel like checking, placing my palm on my own forehead, whether yet warm or not I am, on a morning of journey.
I am a native Japanese speaker and the original version of this article was written in Japanese. This translation was done by myself and may contain some errors due to lack of well writing skill in English. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or concerns about the meaning of the texts.
The original Japanese text is published in following page.
https://homorehabilis.blogspot.com/2023/02/homo-rehabilis_18.html
