When The Moon Sings - August 16, 2025

The end of July distinguished itself with triple digit temperatures.  August has featured temperatures twenty degrees lower and water varying from drip and drizzle to torrential downpour.  Neither encourages outdoor frolics and such frolics occur more often in younger folk anyway.  This has been an indoor stretch of time, saving the outdoors for only needful expeditions.

With the change of month came the ritual of calendar page flipping.  July’s print, though skillfully done, never really drew me in.  August did so immediately.  It’s a scene that reminded me of some places I have been, though I’ve never been closer than a thousand miles from what it depicts.

We stand on the wooded banks of a river, some thirty feet below a road.  Above, in the middle distance a sturdy wooden bridge spans the river, allowing a road to cross.  We have come here in the early morning, perhaps just before sunrise.  Lanterns dot the road through the village on the far shore, mists have gathered between the village and the mountain in the distance, and only the snowcap on the mountain shows in much detail – the rest of the scene still fades slightly in low light.

Since this is a picture, we cannot hear the water gurgling under the bridge or feel the soft bite of spring morning temperatures or hear the birds calling and insects buzzing.  But perhaps we can if we’ve been similar places.  Humans rely on their visual senses much more than the others, and pictures may awaken memories for the other senses.  The picture shows no humans.  Many of the most inspirational scenes omit people.

With imagination, we can walk along the river, perhaps keeping an eye for wildlife, perhaps skipping a stone, perhaps just letting the quiet and beauty of the scene sink into us.  Having seen the picture, perhaps we make the resolution to go there and see that in person.

We have enough information to geolocate it. This is Numa River and the town on the far shore calls itself Kawaibashi.  The mountain with the snowcap is Mount Fuji.  A short distance from Kawaibashi, the Numa flows into the sea, so it may be tidal – add salty smells to your picture of the place.  How nice it would be to go there right now, away from torrential downpours and excessive heat.

Only one problem remains, though it’s a doozy. The picture was created in 1947, in Japan. The mood the picture creates probably isn’t available because the scene has utterly changed. That area has grown and urbanized. I checked using Google Maps; a larger, taller ferro-concrete structure has replaced the wooden house at the far edge of the bridge. modern street lighting has replaced the lanterns beyond the house. I’m not sure, but the bridge itself looks like it too had given way to some more modern and lasting, to accommodate modern traffic.  The town of Kawaibashi has been swallowed up by Fuji city, a booming place of perhaps a quarter million people.  The seventy-eight years since the picture was produced has wrought too many changes.  The picture no longer exists in real life.

Humans process sensory information with a brain that readily envisions changes.  We perceive a thing and wonder what of it were different or how it could be made useful.  That sensory information is mostly visual. Courtesy of a late-night television show, I have learned that men are more visual than women, according to a random female actress whose name I cannot remember. Perhaps we can debate that, but we are all more visual than any other sense most of the time.  Given the blessing of sight without reference to the other senses, the brain works overtime to fill in with other sensory details that harmonize with how we feel about what we see.

That Japanese scene is pretty, so my imagination gussies up the other sensory information.  The temperature is cool, not cold, not even cool enough to require a jacket.  The insects that would feast on exposed flesh in Savannah somehow don’t exist in this part of the world.  The tang of the sea fills the nose, not the stench of things that decompose in tidal rivers.  The lanterns in the distance exist because of hundreds of years of tradition, not the war-damaged utilities in Japan just after the war.  The bridge is wooden for the same reason.  Had I actually been there, I doubt the scene could live up to my imaginings.

The same is true of any art.  George Bellows painted Blue Morning, an impressionist essay on the human-made chasm in New York City that became the foundation for Grand Central Station.  Even though I know the area, the roar of traffic, the screech and thudding of construction equipment, and the carbon-based odor don’t occur to me when I look at the painting.

The same is also true of literature.  An author who frequently references all of the senses will find the audience desperately searching for the thread of the story.  The author must help us focus on the sensory information that moves the story forward.  The most successful provide us with a story and clues about the senses, allowing us to fill in with either our imagination or experience.

This ability both blesses and curses us.  It has enabled us to make the world more habitable – we do not current dwell in caves.  But grander projects usually result in lesser results than we envision.  In some cases, the envisioning wanders so far from what is possible that it turns of the best of intentions into disasters with long casualty lists.  One improvement may result in problems that require other solutions, and life becomes an unending game of whack-a-mole, with problems popping up faster than we can address them.

Public policy based on wishful thinking clearly has its flaws.  But that’s too much to ask of literature or art.  When I awoke this morning, before dawn, flashes of lightning streaked across the southeastern sky.  The midday temperatures will wander into the nineties, with a distinct possibility of a rainstorm with bolts of lightning overhead.  The usual insects will punctuate the discomfort of the outdoors. Indoors, the August calendar offers me a different environment, a relief that I can grasp with only a teaspoon of imagination.  That’s really all I want from it.