Friday, September 24, 2004, 8:20am
Friday, September 24, 2004, 8:20am
A monstrous commuter train this morning takes the place of our typically humble 8:07am carriages. This beast has four double-deckers and three singles, and not only will I likely have a seat all to myself, I am also likely to be surrounded by empty seats as well.
Norm is not running this end of the train and to this point I haven’t heard Frank over the intercom either, so it’s looking like they sent some other train. But having just written this I see Norm walking the aisle heading towards the bow of this land barge.
Beyond our stop at West Natick I have an eerie deja vu experience as Norm walks past my seat once again towards the front of the train – as though there are two Norms – or two threads of time running in parallel. Soon I remember how this happened one other time, and in a moment I’ve repaired the matrix through a conjured image of Norm bounding to the most recent station platform from a car ahead, then racing back along the platform unseen before returning via some other door near the back of the train. Yet even with a proper explanation I have the willies nonetheless as the disjointed experience and the fabricated constructs used to rationalize my experience tread the perpetual battlefront between happenstance and design.
On this misty morning, long before reaching any horizon, clouds creep near the earth to mingle among vapors leaking from warm lakes and woodlands. Depending on the thickness of the clouds, the heights of the terrain, and the density of passing trees I see many shades and hues of gray. In some places I sense a more ‘pure’ gray where light of all colors seen by the human eye falls in equal measure. Just now I briefly notice a ‘warmer’ gray, which has a bit more yellow, orange, or red in the mix and then a moment later ‘cooler’ gray where deep shadows should be lurking, though this morning a gray tinged in the cyan and blue hues associated with the cold of winter. I suppose it might be possible to see a greenish gray or even a violet or magenta gray, but there are no separate distinctions for those sorts of grays, and they are simply lumped into our perceptions of warmer and cooler light.
Frank is aboard, I now realize. From the leading cars of this massive assemblage I hear him making the usual intercom announcement about running ‘express’ out of Wellesley Farms into Back Bay. Back here, Norm passes my seat in a hurry racing into our carriage heading in a direction that now feels ‘right’ by my matrix accounting. I want to ask if we’ll be seeing more of these double-deckers in the future, though it’s doubtful since our regular single-decker train has enough room most mornings and the MBTA has too few of these larger trains to be deliberately wasteful. My question remains unasked as Norm goes scurrying off to handle a Diaspora of passengers spread across 750 linear feet of seating keeping him busy to the point where he’s not stopping to chat with anyone this morning.
Outside, all I see is gray with hardly any tinge of warm or cold. Likely this is not purely gray in the absolute sense – and simply the same color everywhere with my eyes doing their color-balancing act. I remember how Jasper Johns created his famous two-panel painting of the American flag based on the color adaptation of the human eye. His left panel shows the image of the flag painted with green and black stripes and the star field painted yellow with black stars. In the middle of the flag he has placed a dot the same size as a dot placed in the middle of a blank white canvas mounted side-by-side with the flag. There are no instructions, but when I first saw it, I knew exactly what he had done –– just stare at the dot centered in the middle of the green, black and yellow long enough for retinal pigments to saturate, then look at the blank canvass where the suddenly over-compensated pigment is rendered into a red, white, and blue flag.
On approach to our final destination, clouds are breaking up over South Station. Perhaps this afternoon I’ll work on the age-old question of why the sky is blue – and in the process, why apple juice appears yellow.
