In the former Wa State

Must be another sign of aging: the way memories float up to the top of the mind and stay there for hours and days. They are qualitatively different, too. I used to remember women, exclusively, in a kind of soft-porn video. Now the memories are of the lyrical variety: cutting sugar cane in Hawaii; or sitting on a rock in the middle of the stream somewhere in the former Wa State. Not that women don’t matter; but they no longer seem worth remembering.

The last memory was occasioned by Abbas Kiarostami’s Five. The film consists of five long takes: a log on a beach, walkers on a boardwalk, etc., a very Iranian-Japanese sort of thing (it is an NHK production); the last take is of the reflection of the moon and clouds in the undulating surface of a pond. I watched it with intense interest.

And this brought me to the former Wa State.

I own thousands of photos, and hundred of video clips of reflections on water. A large part of the collection was shot on a mountain stream in the former Wa State. I lived in a teak-and-bamboo hut then, at the top of a cliff, overlooking a narrow gorge through which a rapid mountain stream gushed. Every day I went down to the water; sat on rocks in the middle of the stream; and stared in silence and sometimes photographed. There were areas where the water cascaded over rocks, breaking up in fireworks of crystalline flashes; and, at the base of the cliff, an area of calm, where the sky and the rocks reflected in the smooth surface.

Up top, there were women: two who telephoned, two who emailed, one who came to me every night – and every morning said that she waited for me to say something, and one who said she wouldn’t come unless I said something first, which of course I wouldn’t do. But down below there were only reflections and flashes in the water.

It often happens that alpha-male gorillas, which have had large harems and fathered scores of children, at some point throw it all up and retire. They become hermits. They lie on the bed of banana leaves and stare into the distance. Or, presumably, sit on rocks in the middle of the stream and stare at reflections on the water.

It’s commonly called wisdom, though I suspect that reduced levels of testosterone have a lot to do with it. Whatever the cause, there just doesn’t seem enough of it to make it worth the price. Nor is there any intellectual interest in it: it is always the same, it always ends the same.