It
Was in Effect (Elmira Sequence)
It
was in effect
It
was in effect a river of sorts
the
ocean returned its water
across
the vacant hours at the slow crossings of the afternoons
in
low-blood-sugared towns
while
the pale lights of taverns burned.
The
barber sat in his chair listening to the vacuum tube radio
the
cigar vending machine full of Indianhead nickels
the
Emerson Hotel with its dark stairs leading to dens of vacancy
this
was the coastal Highway 101 in 1960.
Tracing
my path, the random trajectory of a
housefly,
I have coursed through the
backroads
of the Pacific Northwest America when
I
was a bit young for the Beats and not quite old enough for
the
Hippies.
Merely
a schoolboy in the logging and fishing town of Aberdeen when
rain
and windshield wiper swings gave me a rhythm to beat words against
one
another in the English creative writing class.
But
Science was still the reigning discipline and Mathematics its Queen,
as
America raced the Soviets to the moon and beyond after
the
Spudnik scare of 1957.
It
was in effect a town of sorts
the
ocean lapped its tongue here
the
mudflats harbored mussels
loggers
shook dice for schooners of beer while
the
sky threatened to rain all day.
The
Chinese cook diced vegetables,
string
beans a mile long, work expands to fill
idle
hours while the Pacific tides contract and expand
across
the pretense of commerce while
small
fishing boats returned with Dungeness crabs three for a dollar.
The
Beatles were all a rage while the Stones were in a rage
however,
I paid no attention as I was trying to penetrate reality in
physics
class and work out chemical valences and balancing
equations,
that inequality was the fundamental state of the
universe
did not enter my mind, nor did I think of going to law school
as
the classmates who took Latin, justice was blindly followed
until
the war in Vietnam erupted.
I
was a loner who helped out at the family Chinese American restaurant
Even
served my classmates and teachers as waiter
wearing
that yellow waiter’s jacket that my forebears had
worn
for three generations. I bring teapot and tea and
egg
drop soup, and set their dinner down before retreating to a
back
corner booth to puzzle out one last algebra equation.
It
was in effect a time of sorts when
high
school graduates still stayed in town
pulp
and paper mills saturated the air that
spelled
jobs and a fair shake for small homeowners.
These
towns were strung along highway 101
the
scenic drive that took you to Pacifica, California
where
surfing was just getting on film newsreels and
soda
was still dispensed in glass bottles.
When
girls dressed to kill in physics class, they say we even
got
Koon’s attention and yet I was accused of cheating in
biology,
physics, and chemistry where Mr. Sieler gave a set of chemistry
handbooks
with my name engraved in gold,
and
MIT had invited me to their conference in Seattle and urged me to apply to
their
school. Later I did and said I wanted to study electrical engineering or
literature.
It
became obvious I knew nothing of their school as they did not at that time have
a
program
in literature. I received a swift rejection.
It
was in effect a life of sorts
when
Vietnam was still some unfamiliar place in the Orient
when
Ricky Nelson was a traveling man with a pretty girl in every port
and
the price was right every night and Groucho hit his marks.
Those
times and places burned like LSD
that
flashed and burned into the next century, but basically
it
was a time before waking up to the enormous world as it stirred while
the
miser still counted his pennies.
Elmira
Sequence
Who
knows any more of time but its direction?
High
school was completed when I read Heraclitus, who said,
“You
can’t step into the same river twice…”
Night
driving to Eugene, Oregon from Seattle
when
I ended up in a greasy spoon next to the rail station
at
3 A.M. with the university catalogue and black coffee on the counter,
I
suddenly veered from mathematics to philosophy,
keen
on learning wisdom from a Professor Wisdom (no joke) of philosophy.
In
the loneliness of the café, I turned to my first love
that
was neither holy nor profane, also neither of blood nor sinew,
it
was simply Platonic.
Around
me those deported the train ate and gulped coffee
as
daylight broke and here was my destination for mind as well as
for
body. I had not a place to stay and I never did, really; however,
blankets
were in the trunk and my pocket had cash.
I
will register to sit next to Professor Wisdom with other pretentious
kids.
Yes, we were kids, pretentious kids, I was one.
Like
three-leaf clover camouflaged in weeds,
a
lucky find, my love for logical parsimony and elegant
arguments
began here, but I was not stellar.
It
merely meant I did not want to be tainted by the world
and
its worldly goods, for nothing impure will I let into
the
Platonic heaven.
College
begins. Here I am in my well-worn groove
trying
to skip across a few bands by whatever means
to
succeed, at whatever price in rubies or steeds.
Yet
a shiver runs through me –
is
this a pristine discovery? Or a nostalgic longing
for
cold water flats and underheated rooms?
We
could barely cover ourselves in the winter in the village in China!
The
days went around and around as current in a super-cooled coil.
The
lyric impulse rides the Greyhound past the mud pastures of
Elmira.
At the sleepy Post House at 5 A.M., the flies under the
florescent
lights over cakes and frosted donuts. Stirring my coffee, I
think
of Brower’s Fixed-Point Theorem – that if you stir smoothly enough,
a
particle of coffee will end up in its original position.
Math
and philosophy, like the right and left palms, when closed together,
is
a prayer to every solution.
But
I was green, and my life was a game of musical chairs.
Sanity
and insanity opened and closed my hands, my brain,
as
materialism and idealism metronome inside my skull.
Forward
a few decades, at the urban sirens my neighbors move about.
The
roomers to the left of me, to the right of me,
change
their faces as I sleep, in angst and anxiety,
and
as I push myself off the mattress at night,
I
feel the heaviness of incompetence and age struggle.
And
now in this high-rise apartment twice last night
The
helicopters whirled by transporting patients to
the trauma center at Harborview Hospital…
My parents had kept saying, “Don’t think too
much!”
But let me return to the pasture at Elmira in
1970,
when a few cows, a few apple trees, and the
night had us as
captive audience, the numeric sleep over
backroads and bumpy
lanes were America not yet hardened and
congealed by the
cold air in the sideroad diner as the gravy on
the
plate of a three-hundred-pound man…
That was Elmira in 1970…
Now the urban landscape is to stack up
density
as the cranes lower the sky
and building peak up to jet space.
Taxis rear end cars trying to accelerate
the lives of passengers.
Brakes are tested at every intersection.
Stop! They are now collapsing new
buildings,
while the construction of mindlessness
goes on.
Here I find myself a “fixed-point,”
knowing that an “experiment” has taken place,
but in as much as my neighbors have changed,
I am unable to characterize my difference…
Koon Woon