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| Moon's Rising and Birds (M.A. Reilly) |
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The 17th century poet, Mizuta Masahide, wrote the
following haiku after watching his barn burn to the ground:
“Barn’s burnt down now I can see
the moon”
I love Masahide's thinking-being in the world. As I
reread I think, sad things happen. How I name life as it is happening, matters
as well. Living in the middle of things allows for possibilities in ways that
event-based time often does not. Living in the middle allows me to better see
how mechanical renderings of life yield lots of beginnings and endings. How I
name something as started or ended is often a matter of routine.
For Masahide the barn burning was neither end nor beginning. It was.
In Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams,
mechanical and body time are considered. Of all of the times proffered, this is
my favorite description.
Lightman writes:
24 APRIL 1905
In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical
time and there is body time. The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive
pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is
unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.
Many are convinced that mechanical time does not exist.
When they pass the giant clock on the Kramgasse they do not see it; nor do they
hear its chimes while sending packages on Postgasse or strolling between
flowers in the Rosengarten. They wear watches on their wrists, but only as
ornaments or as courtesies to those who would give timepieces as gifts. They do
not keep clocks in their houses. Instead, they listen to their heartbeats. they
feel the rhythms of their moods and desires. Such people eat when they are
hungry, go to their jobs at the millinery or the chemist’s whenever they wake
from their sleep, make love all hours of the day. Such people laugh at the
thought of mechanical time. They know that time moves in fits and starts. They
know that time struggles forward with a weight on its back when they are
rushing an injured child to the hospital or bearing the gaze of a neighbor
wronged. And they know too that time darts across the field of vision when they
are eating well with friends or receiving praise or lying in the arms of a
secret lover.
Then there are those who think that their bodies don’t
exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o’clock in the morning.
They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their
appointments on time, precisely by the clock. They make love between eight and
ten at night. They work forty hours a week, read the Sunday paper on Sunday,
play chess on Tuesday nights. When their stomach growls, they look at their
watch to see if it is time to eat. When they begin to lose themselves in a
concert, they look at the clock above the stage to see when it will be time to
go home. They know that the body is not a thing of wild magic, but a collection
of chemicals, tissues, and nerve impulses. Thoughts are no more than electrical
surges in the brain. Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to
certain nerve endings. Sadness no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the
cerebellum. In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of
electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock. As such, the body must be
addressed in the language of physics. And if the body speaks, it is the
speaking of only so many levers and forces. The body is a thing to be ordered,
not obeyed.
Taking the night air along the river Aare, one sees
evidence for two worlds in one. A boatman gauges his position in the dark by
counting seconds drifted in the water’s current. “One, three meters. Two, six
meters. Three, nine meters.” His voice cuts through the black in clean and
certain syllables. Beneath a lamppost on the Nydegg Bridge, two brothers who
have not seen each other for a year stand and drink and laugh. The bell of St.
Vincent’s Cathedral sings ten times. In seconds, lights in the apartments
lining Schifflaube wink out, in a perfect mechanized response, like the
deductions of Euclid’s geometry. Lying on the riverbank, two lovers look up
lazily, awakened from a timeless sleep by the distant church bells, surprised
to find that night has come. Where the two times meet, desperation. Where the
two times go their separate ways, contentment. For, miraculously, a barrister,
a nurse, a baker can make a world in either time, but not in both times. Each
time is true, but the truths are not the same.
The world feels overpopulated with truths some
mornings. Then tensions between living mechanically and bodily clash. At these times, I find (not that I always follow such advice) remembering the barn burning, the moon rising quiets the noise.
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