Some box for the thrill of the fight.  Some fight for pride and respect, and a shot at a belt.  And some belt away, for the money.  But the faceless boxers who appear in the corner of my mind, they fight for not any one reason.  They just show up with their gloves and their fighting intent, and they start boxing.  Circling around in a dimly lit bubble of the mind's eye, their thoughts are slate blank, like their faces, and their emotions seem to be tuned to a perfect zero.  They do not tire or sleep, they do not slow down, and they continue to spar, for all of eternity.


They are the world's most perfect pair of boxers.  


The scene in my mind is so vivid I can almost hear the body blows and the crackle of bones, I can almost see the skim of light against all the flying sweat and blood, and I can almost smell the flay of threads in the floor where their feet sweep the same circular path, the same worn dance.  And with hands that bruise they tear each other, and themselves, slowly apart.


 


In the face of constant destruction, it's a miracle that some things still remain standing.


 In any sort of aftermath, one inevitably looks back and asks, what was the structure that ultimately held everything together?  





Is this the blueprint, of all our longing?

A chapter in my life which I thought had closed has suddenly opened up again.  It has caught me off guard, and I don't know how I feel about summoning old memories.  It will require digging up the past, possibly reanimating that which I have long buried, and figuring out what still remains, after all this time.  The dig will be long and treacherous, for that which I have buried now lies deeper than the ground, down the furthest wells, beneath the sheetrock of my heart, which is littered with who knows how many mines and treacherous air pockets.


I do not know if I will be able to handle the consequences.  


 And at the end of it I might still be uncertain.  


    


When I saw her again, my heart ballooned with a new kind of feeling, one that I had not felt before.  My body moved on its own accord, but my mind was numb and could not speak.  I never thought I would see her again.  And yet there she was, in the same room, in the same space.  


The disconnect I felt then and there is something I find difficult to describe, even now.  It was as if I had cleaved into two persons, at that moment - one apart from myself, standing there, and another right beside myself, here and now.  


In love's infinite tessellations across time, one tends to discover not the common thread that binds it all together, but rather its innumerable contradictions: aches that do not ache in the right place, memories that do not fit photographs and journals, and feelings that do not lend themselves in accordance to what one might expect one should feel.


 


I pulled her away from the crowd, drawing surprise from her friends, and glares that I could feel on the back of my head like pinpoint lasers.  But what else could I do?  I had only one chance to get her alone with me and this was it.  We stole into a coffee shop and I sat across from her, searching her eyes, hoping to find mine.  We did not have much time.  So we talked of many things, each very briefly, crammed into the little time that we had.  Our new jobs, our new lives.  

I thought of telling her how beautiful she looked, how I wished I could see her like this, more often.  But old habits die hard; smoothed over by an implacable scar, the words refused to surface.

Instead, I saw the future rolling out before me, as if what was happening was already in the past, and I was my future self looking back at my present self.  And whatever I was doing - the coffee cup in my hand, the sounds of the cafe, the girl before me - was already becoming a part of my past, even as it was happening.  I saw the five hour ride home ahead of me, the already rushing lights, the way they would singe and burn in memory.  I saw weeks and years surge forward, like some space ship time traveling to the future, blotting out the present.  I felt my present self being pulled apart, disappearing.  All the while I was whispering, searching, trying to feel something, then feeling something else, then feeling nothing at all because it was not yet time.

But hey, let's not get ahead of ourselves.


 


The metaphor of the boxers is a poor one, actually, not quite accurate.  Perhaps there were not two boxers, but only one all this time.  Confused, the boxer butts his gloves and head together, ready as ever for battle, shuffling his feet in the same circular patterns.  He looks around, but there is only him.  He is uncertain as what to do.  He paws at the empty air, where the other boxer should be.  He shuffles his feet some more, half-heartedly hissing through his mouthguard.  Sweat continues to flow out of every pore of his skin, and adrenaline is coursing like buckshot through his veins, but for what he does not know.  And what he does not know, he misses.  Even for the phantom blows, and the pain that should be familiar, but is not.  And in its place, he feels a different kind of pain, altogether.  


Like this:


 


It was like this when we first met - the only coin of memory's memento that I've held onto for all these years.  Yet this too, is patently false, for it does not snow like this here.  Yet I beg of you, how could this not be true (even if it is someone else's photograph)?


 


So many false things, so many contradictions.  


If the future has already happened, and we are just looking back on the present from the long, telescoping arm of Death that awaits us from Time's end [or heaven/hell, what have you], and, if the past is so easily subject to the distortion of memory, then what is to say the present isn't one pin prick away from disappearing, completely?





 Ah yes, the structure.  The thing that held it all together?  What could have survived all this time - what is the circle around which the boxer dances, the frame that held up and continues to hold up both sheetrock and the sky, the invisible line that connects all the disparate elements across an infinitely dividing continuum?


What is bigger than memory itself?


Is there such a thing?


 


All I know is that in the end, all it will take is just one look - one look from you, my way, to crumble all structures of this story.  For the words I've used to construct these memories, they are the house of cards that I live in, they are the gavel by which I fall.  


So we can forget the past, if you would but will it. And the future?  I do not know.  


Until then, this is us: across the table, coffee, and flowers.


 

the weekend before i went in to get my eyes checked, i went to visit a local modern art museum.  it was a small museum, of only a few galleries and a few sculptures, but held a number of notable artists i recognized and liked, including Diebiekorn, and Rodin.  but as i was strolling around, i began to feel a certain deficiency with the light.  no matter how many times i wiped my glasses, the paintings and the room were not quite clear, not quite focused.  


from a distance, the paintings became blurry, too far to hold in the single frame of the mind.  


only when up close, the details of a painting began to reveal itself, the globs of paint fixated in time upon a canvas not unlike a sculpture in and of itself, in accordance with the mood of the brushstrokes, here short and angry clashes of heavy red and beige, there long dispassionate sweeps of lavendar barely skimming the surface.





but the whole of the paintings eluded me; there was no distance at which i could reasonably place myself to view both detail and form in the same frame.  It was as if the frustratingly elusive blur of a monet had been taken to an extreme, not by design, but by the optical limit of a corporeal mortality.  


a terrible hunger then came over me, a hunger for light like i had never known, as i imagined an ever darkening world.  it made me sad to think of all that has been  lost.  to think, what details have been missing all this time?  and all the things that cannot be seen with what has been given?  What have we lost, not because they are not there, but because we cannot see it?  Still yet, are there things we forget to grieve, simply because we do not know that it has left?





the eye is a remarkable organ, considering its function and mechanics. here is a piece of flesh that is both organic, with its flow of blood and oxygen, miscellaneous secretions, a complete network of vessels and nerves, and also optical, a highly precise and sophisticated instrument.  This is tissue that bends the very light around us, distilling it, channeling it, focusing it onto another spot of tissue, where it converts light from thin air into signals that get sent to the brain.





back in university, I took a couple quarters to study with a neurobiology lab whose research was on retinal ganglion cells.  These are the neurons that respond to light stimuli and, in turn, send electrical signals down the optical nerve to the thalamus.  These electrical signals are remarkably like the signals sent on any piece of electrical wire, a stream of binary bits, highs and lows, 1's and 0s.  Yet the spike patterns by which the neurons fire, the neural code in which information is carried, and the exact response to a passing photon is not yet well characterized.  in other words, we still don't fully understand the language by which visual information is communicated to the brain -- how does this happen, by what means?  A neuron firing along one nerve at a rapid rate might indicate, for example, a localized brightness, or another neuron firing in another type of pattern might indicate the motion of light as it passes laterally from the field of view.  And it is somewhat incredible to think that the sum of all these neurons firing, in accordance to this mysterious, terse language, forms the image that we hold in our head.  It's the image you hold in your head, right now, reading this.  The contrast between a the letter 'r' against the white, the monitor screen and keyboard before you, the glint of light against metal and plastic and glass, every little detail, every which way your eye flicks and dashes about, these neurons are firing signals into your brain, where at some implaceable seat of your mind, an image forms -- the image you are seeing, right now.








the path along the optic nerve is essentially a one way journey; retinal ganglion cells respond only to the light that shines upon it, and nothing else.  that is to say, it is not dependent on the host, or the brain, to trigger its action.  to study these cells in further detail in lab, retinas from euthanized mice would be extracted and isolated, and hooked up on one end to an electrical sensor grid, and exposed to a computer monitor at the other end. there various images would flash and the output of the cells would be measured.  and these cells can be kept alive, apart from the host, for days on end, with the neurons none the wiser.





it's somewhat sobering to wonder if, in the moments after a person's death, there still exists a group of lone, renigade cells firing away, firing images down a dark and empty corridor.








one day, scientists will crack the neural code, and finally come to understand what all those spikes along the neurons mean and represent.  some believe that understanding the language of spike trains along the optic nerve will lead to understanding the language of the brain itself.  it also means that you could, hypothetically speaking, probe the optic nerve "in vivo", decode the signals in the same way as the brain, and display onto a monitor everything that the person sees, in real time, just by capturing the streams of their optic nerve.  





Once you understand the neural code, it's not that big of a leap in imagination to go from the analysis of signals to the synthesis of signals -- capturing images with a camera, for example, and feeding them directly into the optic nerve.  perhaps the holy grail of prosthetics, occular implants remains, shall we say, one of the loftier dreams of basic scientific research as applied to human self:  to give sight to the blind, in accordance with the prophesy of the ages.











but what's to stop us there?  what's to keep us from generating our own signals and patterns, of our own choosing, to pipe into our brains, filling it with images of our own volition?  who's to stop us from drawing cubes and figures, mapping virtual atmospheres, rendering in full three-dimension scenes directly onto our conciousness?  the possibilities are limited only by our own imagination, the virtual world of our dreams, flickering and firing away as fast as we can signal on a wire.  







but still there are things for which i cannot use the force of imagination to ressurect, facets of a dimension in time and space that i think no amount of technology will ever be able to replicate or reproduce.  Heaven, for example -- what would this look like, if it were really to exist?  I would like to believe for it to exist, it would have to be in a dimension beyond the grasp of our imagination, irreplaceable by neurons and the feeble limits of our language, both more wonderful and terrible than the what the mind can comprehend.  





and likewise, on no less a smaller scale, i see the limit of my imagination before you now, as i cannot begin to imagine what you look might look like now: you the reader, reading these words, whom i may or may not have ever met.  darkness shrouds the medium by which these words appear before me and you.  and by that darkness the imagination wears thin, like the cords of a faded denim, like the sky that grows dimmer by one thousandth of an f-stop with each passing day.





but for now, let the neurons dance and play, as they will in the transposition of mediums, if not in the apple of Sight's delight then in the gong of the mecurial ear, and if not in the audience of aural landscapes then in the symphony of smell and taste, and if not these then in the raw, visceral pounding of the blood in our own hearts, the steady rise and fall of our chests, let them sing and rejoice, let it be known that, even failing these limits of the imagination, there is beauty itself, there is faith, there is always at least one thing that connects us, even in the darkest of darknesses, even when all is said and done, even when the last of our neurons refuse to fire.

some years ago, i was trying to get the attention of this girl, who was a med school student at the time, by volunteering in the annual church health fair.  she worked the booth with the blood pressure monitor, and I worked the check-in counter.  My task was easy; I just had to take down names and direct people around to the different booths: flu shots, diet consultations, optometry, etc, and I thought it would give me the chance to say hello.  Unfortunately, the job didn't let me talk to her much.  So at the end of the day, I thought I would be smooth and walk over to her booth, and get her to give me the check-up she had been giving everybody else. Why, Hello Doctor.  


It was all going so well until she put on her stethoscope and measured by blood pressure.

"Hey your blood pressure is kinda high"

"Oh yeah? Ha ha"

"Has it always been this high?"

"Ha ha..."

"Do you have a family history of high blood pressure?"

"Umm..."

"How's your diet? Do you eat a lot of fatty foods?"

"..."

"Do you get enough regular exercise?"


"..."








Needless to say, sometimes, the things we say and do have a way of backfiring on us.  some of us, more than others.  


quick, while there is still time to escape.











But what does it all mean?


not too long ago, i went to see murakami haruki, novelist and short story writer, speak at zellerbach hall.


when asked about the deeper meanings of his work, and the meaning of "the elephant vanishes", he said, "sometimes, an elephant is just and elephant.  and a refrigerator is just a refrigerator".














He also said, "I write stories like playing video games. No stress.  A scene starts with just a word.  And then I make up my mind to write.  I don't know what happens next.  I catch it and write it down.  Sometimes I am the player.  And sometimes I'm the programmer.  Very complicated and exciting at the same time.  Very weird.  It's fun."


"The job of the novelist is to dream while being awake."














the mark morris dance group has an interesting -- if not controversial -- outlook on prokofiev's romeo and juliet.  According to Prokofiev's rediscovered old notes, the composer had intended to refashion the ending to the tragedy so that it would not be so, well, tragic.  Instead of swallowed poison and a dagger to the chest, the star-crossed lovers discover each other's plans via twitter.  Just kidding.  The good hearted Friar Lawrence steps in and wakes the sleepy duo, and prokofiev's revised score surges forward with lush feeling and renewed vigor.


Romeo and Juliet, very much alive, then take turns flaunting their power leg thrusts, leaps, and pirouettes, until the montagues and capulets are forced to see the error of their ways and reconcile.  curtain falls and applause.





Wouldn't it be great if we could retool the circumstances of our failed plans?  prokofiev's interpretation falls short, in my view, only because the central tenets of the story, being told again and again for so long, have become fundamentally immutable.  There is still something to be said though about prokofiev's yearning.  for we, the audience, already know how happens, and what we see is the projection of collective rewrite, "if only".  for there is a suspicion in our hearts that the endings to our own stories are still very much open, in what has not yet happened, in what is and what isn't destined to be, in all the future unknown possibilities that will separate us from our past.





going back to murakami, and his approach toward writing, he offers this one piece of advice, this time a bit more sobering: "[In order to write your story] You must go down to your deepest well, the place of your darkest obsessions.  From there you will observe things, catch things in the darkness. 


"But you must be strong, strong enough to come back.  You have to come back.  If you cannot come back,  you will be lost."











Sometimes, it feels like the story has not yet started, that life, full of false starts and hopes, is in its first draft of a perpetual rewrite.  Other times it feels like the dark well from which there is no escape.  Under the haze of another sleepless night, it's sometimes hard to say which is which.  But I will just say that just outside my window, there is a bird who thinks it's day and who is happily and noisily chirping away like no tomorrow.  Under the glow of a incandescent, flickering nightlight is a bird for whom the story has already started.  And even though dawn is more than a few hours away, listening to her song one can't help but wonder why not.