Immortal

O.K.  Everything I thought I saved from yesterday is gone.  All the wisdom and poetry and urgency.  I thought I'd saved it as a draft, but it is not here.  Like Hemingway after the loss of his short stories on the train, I'll move on.

One thing that had caught my attention was an article about a scientist in Japan who studies a hydrozoan called the Immortal Jellyfish.  He has discovered secrets of eternal life, perhaps, at least at the poetic level.  The Immortal is able to revert to former life forms and begin anew if it is injured or ill.  You may remember the life cycle of the jellyfish from your biology class--polyp, medusa, rinse, spin, repeat.  The secret of the eternal cycle may lie within.

Of course, this is more poetry than science.  As much as we hope for renewal, we know it can only be spiritual and made up at best.  The worst. . . we must deny.

But the image of the scientist is what captured me eventually if not initially--for I, too, long for immortality, as does Mr. Kubota, the scientist.  When told he looked younger than his years, he replied,

"Too old.  "I want to be young again.  I want to become miracle immortal man."

Kubota lives alone on a stretch of beach in a small Japanese village.  He has a routine.  He studies, researches, orders take-out, and sings at a karaoke bar nightly.  The picture of contentment--a simple, meaningful life.

What is most endearing for me, though, is the poetry that seemingly informs his science.  It is serious.  It is whimsy.  He is warmly human.  And he is wise.  For though he longs for his own physical eternity, he understands the problem beyond scientific reason.

"Human beings are so intelligent," he told me, as if to reassure me.  But then he added a caveat.  "Before we achieve immortality," he said, "we must evolve first.  The heart it not good. . . .  Human beings must learn to love nature," he said.  "Today the countryside is obsolete.  In Japan, it has disappeared.  Big metropolitan places have appeared everywhere.  We are in the garbage.  If this continues, nature will die. . . .  Self control is difficult for humans. . . .  In order to solve this problem, spiritual change is needed."

Like Mr. Kubota, I haven't time for that.  And so, I, too, must learn to live in metaphorical science/the science of metaphor, in the Zen moment stretched to eternity, in a cup of tea, in the focussing of the mind.  Let all distraction fall away.  Study.  Eat.  Live.  Breathe.

We are in the garbage.