A while ago my friend K. told me how much he likes Japan, "I feel at home," he said. We agreed that it was wonderful to find a second home. Mine is South Beach, where this dog looked back at me as he waited outside the 13th Street Post Office. The climate is warm. I can shed my heavy clothes and sometimes my cares. Tell me, Where do you feel at home?
In the recent New York Review of Books Freeman Dyson writes: "When expressed in mathematical equations, the laws of quantum mechanics are clear and unambiguous. Confusion arises from misguided attempts to translate the laws from mathematics to human language." But I'll do it anyway: I feel when I walk in South Beach things respond to me and I to them, and in that situation both those things and I are changed. I like to think this experience is like Heisenberg's "observer effect," which "refers to changes that the act of observation will make on the phenomenon being observed." He meant changes that could be measured mathematically, probably unlike what I experience.
Yet, it's not just dogs that look back at me. "Looking back" may not be the best term. These plants do not have eyes, yet when I stand next to them I feel we are altering each other, changing each other.
I walk for hours and appreciate the public toilets. The reflected flash covers my face, and it looks as if I am holding a lit globe.
Some trees on Jefferson have been pruned and painted in the Spanish manner. Does that limit our exchange? (Come to think of it: the high style of those fashion runway shows is like this pruning and painting. The style affects us but we cannot affect it.)
The architectural styles vary. Every time I go out I see something new.
Someone has put two guardian statues on the two balconies of a pent house.
Nothing blocks the view. My eyes can trip out.
Perhaps my feeling at home in South Beach is a return to childhood, when I only half understood what adults were saying. In South Beach I hear many languages, mostly Spanish, and can understand only a few words.
