technology

Directions at sunrise

You don’t want to know why I was waiting outside Castle Hospital’s emergency room at  six in the morning, but Uber had told me to expect a red Cadillac driven by a man named Willy. “Oh Detroit,” I thought happily, anticipating a conversation full of memories. And then Cadillac drove up.

It didn’t use the driveway; it, with Willy, waited for me on the other side of the parking lot. I hauled myself up from the hospital’s wheelchair, walked over to the redness, and opened the door. Inside was a sign counseling me to close it carefully, and in the driver’s seat Willy wasn’t what I thought he’d be. He was an elderly local man seated among several thermoses, and from his rear view mirror hung a rosary. Morning sun tinged its red crystal beads, and all of Cadillac’s windows were open, with a cool wind blowing through.

From the T intersection at Castle Junction it’s a short straight drive back to my house in Hawaii Kai, via Waimanalo. But Willy didn’t drive down the T; instead, he turned right and headed toward downtown Honolulu on Pali Highway. I didn’t ask him to correct our course, because it was coming to me that I was embarked on a farewell tour. Sites were showing themselves to me for probably the first time and possibly the last time since I had had to lift my hands from the wheel forever after. Past us once more they came: woods, then the steep climb up Pali Highway to the cliffs; then the tunnel and the peak and the way back down the other side into the city. Again, again, the memory things in their morning light: the Korean consulate; Temple Emanuel; a ramshackle fundamentalist school where Haesun had applied for a librarian’s job right after we moved to Hawaii; the upcurving roofs of the Sanju Pagoda. Then the Buddhist Center and the on-ramp curving down and east into the morning traffic on Interstate H-1.

After H-1 ends, its continuation on Kalanianaole Highway is contraflowed in the early morning, with four of the six lanes coned to direct traffic west. Cadillac and I were bound east, slow in the remaining two lanes. At our speed there was no longer much air blowing through Cadillac’s windows, so for the first time I could hear what Willy had been paying his attention to.

It was Republican talk radio. “Oh I never knew that!” gushed the straight girl, and after that the man with the voice used his basso to stimulate and arouse. Together, the man and the girl began taking turns admiring Bobby Kennedy Jr. Those . . . senators . . . tried to yell at him, sneered the basso, but he showed them. By now the hospital was on the other side of the island.

—

From Africa has come Elon Musk: now the richest and most mobile man in the world but also known for his eleven or so current children conceived by artificial insemination.

Also from Africa there came Aurlus Mabélé (1953-2020). He died during what, post-Bobby Jr., we may wind up calling the First Covid Pandemic. But while he was among us he fathered thirteen children.

Without apparatus, let us think.

Commercial appeal:

thou wast not born for death. Printed on a small surface, a poem addressed to a bird told the bird so. But then the bird entered the past tense, leaving the poem behind in the present. Said the poem to itself, silently: “Fled is that music.”

Afterward, on a large surface, these other words were printed:

“cheese-box”

Head-Phone

Watcher-of-the-Silent-Places

Quote:

Silently, on their paper, for the time that was then being, they were a promise of something not on the paper: unsilence. But they were nouns, not verbs. They were a promise that could be but not be made. Listen in again, a century later, and confirm: promised unsilence has failed to descend over the Port-of-Missing-Men. The promise’s  typographical manifestation, this decor of quotation marks and hyphens and capital letters, is a written language, not a spoken language. Just above its surface, the air is still still.

The paper

My wife and I landed in Honolulu for the first time on August 5, 1977, and five years later to the day our daughter was born. On August 5, 2024, I celebrated the anniversary by climbing into Newspapers.com and looking up the Honolulu Advertiser for August 5, 1982. Back then Honolulu had two newspapers, and we subscribed to the one delivered to our apartment that morning, the morning our daughter arrived by premature surprise.

Once you’re past page 1, how different the paper’s universe seems now. On August 5, 1982, Gibson’s, a popular department store no longer extant, was proffering calculators on back-to-school sale, and Kaimuki Typewriter, likewise no longer extant (and never, during my memory, in Kaimuki) was running a big ad featuring the new and expensive daisywheel typewriter. Mainly, though, the news from the back pages then is that there were back pages: page after page of them, filled with classified ads to be read on wood-pulp paper.

Those trees are down now, of course. But what has remained unchanged since 1982 is still time, and time still has its page 1. Terrible things are about to happen, says page 1, then as now. Terrible things, specifically, in Beirut.

The columns in the temple fall and rise and refall and re-rise, forever.