Sunday in the Park with the Cosmos

HONG KONG, UNITED KINGDOM (MPI) — We have plans to go hiking. We are to meet at 11:00. But I’m too exhausted, having had a real hard time getting to sleep. I call, and we reset our meeting time to 3:30 p.m. Then it rains. But at 3:30 I’m there, at the Fringe Gallery, where we had agreed to meet. The gallery is closed, but inside, busily dismantling the Terry Ka-Wai Mak exhibit are Terry and his several helpers. He doesn’t notice me waiting outside. Moments later, Simon arrives.

I think I’ve kind of run into a wall here — the wall between actual, ongoing human life and the duties of the literary diarist. I mean, with this technology, one is able to report on events and send them out across the world almost as soon as they occur. That’s great for news events, but I’m beginning to feel a little less glib about relationship news “as it happens,” since it almost seems kind of disrespectful to the person (besides me) being written about.

I think I ought not allow the documenting of a relationship to intrude upon its natural unfolding, in the same way that a good stand-up comic follows the good advice, “don’t step on your own laugh line.” One has to give the audience a chance to breathe — a space to laugh. Here, I’m thinking I ought not “step on my own love line” — that I should give whatever is happening with Simon a chance to breathe — space to develop naturally, privately.

So... suffice it to say that Sunday was a very nice day, and I am trying all-the-harder now to stay here.

Meanwhile, Those Clouds, That Twirling

In the last week or so, I’ve taken to running in Victoria Park. Saturday night, after I came home from the gallery date with Simon, I went running. I was full of energy and so ran for a long time. I was so psyched up not so much because of Simon, but largely because of an intriguing e-mail that sounded like a real job opportunity (but later, today found out it was just another heinous Amway distributor).

So it’s Saturday night, very late, and there are those weirdly visible clouds again. And I’ve completed my fourth lap around the park (a record!) and am doing my “Victory” cool-down, walking lap when I notice that there are, scattered across the park, people, lying face up on the grass, close to midnight, just watching the clouds! What an excellent idea! And so I slog out onto the grass, find myself a spot, and faze out.

Behind the city-lit clouds are stars on the black background. But because the clouds are moving, it looks like the stars are also moving. And then I notice that not all of the clouds are moving in the same direction, or at the same speed. Who’s moving? The clouds, the stars, me on this grass, Hong Kong Island? Wandering into the future, into 1997? No fixed point of reference — relativity lesson played out across the Hong Kong sky. Is this what we’re doing? Wafting on ships of moment in a great space-time sea?

Is Hong Kong moving toward China? Is China drifting toward capitalism? In what direction moves the deck of the boat I’m sailing on? And is this spot in space-time moving? Wandering toward a night in 1983 where a younger, bearded self takes in the heavy, fragrant Baton Rouge air on the parade ground at LSU near midnight, lies in the over-long grass, overwhelmed by vastness, October, the surrealism that so pervades the ways of being in Louisiana...

And as that moment floats across the quantum netscape of a life lived, connected by internal code to decades past, does it brush against the moment 10 years earlier, when my grandfather says something mean-sounding to me in French that I don’t understand as we wait on the wharf for the fish to come — that time between his utterance and his benign translation, that even at that age, I somehow don’t believe is accurate...

And where do your floating moments pass near mine — those of you whom I love as friends, the few whose lives and mine meshed more closely, the few whose lives and mine have never even touched but for these patterns of magnetism slung across the ether, organized to represent digits that make symbols, words that make sentences, themselves symbols — approximations, really — of ideas, of little thought-ships, captainlessly adrift in boundless ocean?

The Professor’s concocted super-glue suddenly comes unstuck, and planks of the newly repaired S.S. Minnow come flinging off the hull. But Mary-Ann’s eyes, suped-up by radioactive carrots, spy another ship, far in the distance: the USS Enterprise, encountering a gigantic Space Amoeba.

If you should pass within range of the unassisted eye, please wave.