The Future Is Japanese (21 page)

Observing the celestial bodies and calculating their orbits through the sky is a secret hobby for Leo and the old man. Even if they didn’t try to keep it a secret, though, the only other person within earshot is me.

Strewn on the desk in the tumbledown shack are a slide-rule and a hand-cranked calculator; the floor is covered with a pile of punch cards and other stuff. The old man says understanding the movements of the celestial bodies requires first a knowledge of the basics of science. The reason for this is simple. Points move in a vacuum, that is all. The stars themselves have no insides and no emotions. They conform faithfully to strictly defined rules, they never complain, they move mutely along. Or at least that was the case a long, long time ago. Now might be a little different.

That is what those two say to those of us here now, unable to tell anymore from one day to the next even whether Orion is looking to the right or to the left. Like children learning to write their letters, who often confuse
p
and
q
,
b
and
d
. Our minds are swiftly deteriorating, and we can no longer even grasp that we no longer even know what we really are. We call ourselves “humankind,” but we are reverting to childhood’s end. By now we should be crawling out of our cradles, but instead for some reason we find ourselves crawling back into another one.

To understand the movements of the constellations, first one has to understand what a constellation is. Leo and the old man, however, do as they please, saying that constellations can be said to be looking left or right. Of course, there is no reason why stars should be moving around like that; what’s moving is just what’s in our heads. Those who would observe the celestial bodies must begin by facing that that lies within themselves. What a vexing universe we inhabit. To understand how steadily stupid we are becoming on a daily basis, one need look no further than that idiot Leo. Today once again Leo is standing beneath the full moon, lemonade in one hand, observing Orion while trying to make me understand.

“What I mean is, if there is a universe where Orion is looking to the right, and a universe where Orion is looking to the left, we could say we live in a universe somewhere in between.”

“By the same logic as the trains …” I start to say in desperation. One can deduce one’s position along the tracks by counting the number of trains going from right to left versus the number of trains going from left to right. That’s how we know that our town is one-fifth of the way from the end of the earth. To me, Orion always looks like he’s looking to the right, but if someone were to ask me what that means, my confidence would crumble. If all the
b
’s and
d
’s in the world were switched, and then if the mechanisms inside my head that recognize a
b
as a
b
were also switched so that
b
seemed like
d
, I would never even be able to notice the change.

The astronomy that Leo and the old man are constructing is based on a similar kind of substitution, and it has grown into a giant sophistry where the microcosmos that exists in our heads is linked directly to the macrocosmos of the universe. Their view is that a human-scale process of substitution is now under way, and their evidence for this is the Orion that can change his orientation and the full moon that winks. If things that by rights should not be possible actually occur as if they are natural, the assumption that these things should not be possible must be mistaken. It could be either the stars or us that’s crazy, or of course it could also be both.

We are already on our way to becoming unable to distinguish
b
’s from
d
’s, and we are unable to grasp the wave of change that is threatening to envelop us. That said, the problem is really one of perception; the unseeable is unseeable, and there is nothing we can do about that. At least, I can’t see it. These two are the only ones in town who actually perceive the changes taking place, and one of them is the town drunk and the other a mere child.

From sane to crazy, the change is slow. And what is sanity then? Someone who was once sane and turns crazy still thinks of himself as sane. A sane person who is going crazy, and during that process continues to assert that he is still sane, is in a way affirming his insanity. If, up in the sky, hung an insanity in the shape of the moon, it would still stare down on those of us on the face of the earth.

“Regardless of the veracity of your logic …”

“It is verifiable,” Leo responds curtly.

“But you need some proof!” I say.

“Our understanding of the turning of Orion has reached a point where we can predict its frequency,” Leo says.

“That’s not what I mean. You need some objective proof! I only see an Orion looking to the right.”

Leo points at the moon.

The old man was just a child when the city on the face of the moon first appeared, shouting in its sleep in radio waves. And actually, that was just a memory of the old man’s. Everyone else says the moon has always looked just the way it does now.

“Somebody else has started to be able to see the city on the moon,” Leo says.

“Who? Just tell me, who?”

“This is still just a hypothesis,” Leo says, uncharacteristically timid. “Whales, maybe, or porpoises. Or perhaps squid or lichens. Or Antarctic krill.”

Hmmm, I say, trying to look profoundly impressed. Recently I have begun to suspect that lemonade might have an intoxicating effect on certain people.

“Don’t you realize that the human senses are more subtle than our thoughts?” Leo grumbles, looking somewhere beyond me with that look that dreamers get in their eyes. For a second I think that Leo, who could see Orion left-right-reversed, might be seeing me front-back-reversed.

“People’s understanding of nature is flawed,” Leo continues with a shake of the head, addressing no one in particular. “But something has begun to understand nature better than people are able to.”

Leo is flapping the arms wildly, and the lemonade bottle falls to the roof, disgorging its contents. In accordance with the laws of nature, it rolls off the edge of the roof and disappears into the darkness.

“Empires and dinosaurs have their similarities.” Leo has begun to cross to the far side of the fine line between genius and insanity and continues to spout random chains of thoughts into the empty air. “Just as the world once viewed by the dinosaurs has disappeared, the world viewed by empires has also disappeared.”

I can hardly tell if Leo is whispering something or just breathing heavily.

“It could be that the human race is being expelled from its current cognitive niche.”

The human race has evolved to the point where it can comprehend the process of evolution. Though it may seem natural now, this is something that is anything but self-evident. Even if one is completely unaware of evolution, the process of evolution proceeds anyway. Trains run without having any awareness of logic, and we humans are able to think about things. The day we become unable to think about things unless we know how we are supposed to think about them, that will definitely be the day we no longer have time to think about anything.

The term
cognitive niche
is also something the old man dug up from the ancient texts; it is not a new invention. For something to be cognizant of something else is about as natural as for something to eat something else. Living things compete with one another for limited resources. This is the way it is, so that in the daisy chain of edible objects, one finds the most suitable niche of prey species among the many possibilities, and pointless competition can be averted. If two species exist that eat the same things and have the same fighting skills, they will not be able to occupy the same niche. They will have to settle in different locations, to enhance the efficiency of the whole. Of course, this expresses the process in reverse: the less effective one will be forced to go on a drastic diet, and it will starve to death. Or it will simply be eaten. Isn’t it obvious?

Applying this idea to the cognitive process, one arrives at the idea of the cognitive niche, which is where we say, “This means that.” A person looks at an apple, a bat looks at an apple, a donkey, a dog, a cat, a chicken can all be friends and observe apples—that is when the apple really starts to shine. That’s the way it is, so that an apple can really feel more like an apple. Someday I’d like to ask Leo or the old man what that really means.

We are the ones who took the places of some newcomers who were already occupying this niche. That is the opinion of the pair who are able to see Orion turn. Those two, who can observe Orion look to the left, think human consciousness is moving into a niche that was previously occupied by some other life-form. Or else this: the human cognitive process is invading something somewhere, rendering the transformation of our consciousness inevitable.

Our capacity to process information does not extend to fully processing the data input by our sensory organs. Right now, in the night sky above our heads, countless stars are shining. I can look at each one individually like this, but I cannot remember them all individually. If one of them should be extinguished tomorrow, or if a new one should be added, I wouldn’t notice. And somehow or other I think that is how the number of stars increased so dramatically, while we were not paying attention. I live my life unaware of the hairs that are quietly saying sayonara to my father’s scalp, until one day I notice that his hair has grown very thin. As I grow, my eyes get higher above the ground, but I can’t say I’ve noticed that as it is happening.

We waste information, letting it flow from right to left without really processing it. It might move us a little bit, emotionally, but that’s about it. With all that freely leaking information, people say something else is chowing down on it. Something that is better than people are processing it.

Two species in the same niche is one too many.

For ordinary thinkers, doubting one’s own thoughts is probably the sane thing to do, but Leo and the old man are powerful thinkers, and they can’t abide that kind of sanity. They are the kind of people who can look at a nonsensical universe and remake astronomy itself.

“But matter is solid,” I argue back lamely. Even if most people think the earth is flat, that doesn’t make the earth flat. “But it does look flat,” Leo says. Or one might think earthquakes result when the earth’s crust slips on the sweat of the elephants that are holding it up. “We are free to sense whatever we want. I’ll give you that,” I say. But Leo says that is not the case. “Sensations are not like thoughts. We are not free to believe we did not sense whatever it is we just sensed,” Leo says.

“We can only think that we sense it by mistake,” Leo says. “If there is such a thing as detecting the existence of molecular particles, or sensing the effects of evolution, that is just a mistake. ‘Molecular particles’ and ‘evolution’ are just words that were created to help us understand. They are something we recognize, not something we perceive. It is because we cannot sense them that we thought them up. But if we feel them as actual sensations, that fact itself is unassailable.”

“But matter is solid!” I repeat, without any intention of fooling anyone. “Or numbers are,” I add. Even if humans get so stupid they can no longer count any higher than three, that doesn’t mean numbers don’t exist anymore. This is not a matter to be decided by majority rule. I would rather believe it is something that is not to be decided at all.

“Well, so, how about that then?” Leo is pointing quietly to the sky.

Today again there is a huge full moon, and the pupil defined by the city on the surface of the moon is quietly gazing down upon us. Even I can certainly see that eye. And it certainly seems to be winking.