One Thousand Things Per Second

It remains visually remarkable.  It hasn’t settled yet as something fully comprehensible and therefore not especially distinct.  When you are driving in a car at 60mph, it is inhuman.  You have no business watching things pass by at that speed.  But there you are.  There they go, just as they always have since you can recall.  Driving in a car this fast is one of the most normal, protean parts of life. 

Riding at 320 kph or whatever this high speed train is moving at is visually exhausting.  I’m getting fatigued gazing at one thousand things per second.  The trees and the corn fields and small villages and larger villages are all gulped in as if through bionic eyes.  I can imagine my pupils dancing about trying to process so much near-term information in the air as if trying to grasp the texture of smog and moisture and soot. 

I have figured out how to buy my train tickets on Ctrip.  This has changed the game.  I’ve re-calibrated my Beijing_Shanghai travel to become terrestrial.  Outside of Shanghai there almost seemed to be the beginnings of a pristine ex-burbia blooming.  Here, up north, sailing into Shandong nothing like that is evidenced.   Villages are more rudimentary.  Agriculture more industrial.  Poor Shandong, seemed to always be enduring the burden of pollution, stoically, silently.  Good soldiers don’t complain.  At least to superiors. 

Harold Land’s album “Eastward Ho! “Sounds mature, sensible.  His tone is always so gentle and embraceable as he dives about, pleading.  I’ve been resurfacing for much of the summer.  A vacation, working from another time zone, a class to teach over a long weekend.  This week I closed out the class and began swimming upward, through weeks of must-do’s.  Settled back in my own place there will home cooking and mornings in the gym and more regular meditation, all the handrails that are supposed to keep self-management productive. 

I love the immediacy of travel, where we suspend time and focus necessarily on the immediate.  But maintaining personal rigor during so much immediacy is all but impossible. It’s like trying to focus on one singular item outside this window.  There are too many points in a Serat painting to cognate.  It’s just slow enough so I can process things but too fast to order or categorize.  What I do know, is that as with my resurfacing, I’m heading in a general direction:  North.  This self-wrought tension is a form of fuel in my life.  Not precise but certainly kinetic. 

Friday, 8/04/17