2.(17-19) A Most Delightful Flightful

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17. The Unused Ninety Percent

Kimura puts the still-lit marijuana onto his personal glass ashtray, lifts his cup of coffee, and sniffs its fragrance.
   Ali raises her teacup: “To us. Now we met, le’s not lose each other in this brief existence in consciousness.” They clink and drink. “Well, what’ll y’talk about next, Hon?”

   He pulls out his wallet and she thinks. Some more brilliant words on a dirty ole scrap a paper, ah hope, ah hope, ah hope, ah hope!  ” He passes it and she reads: “If the human mind could absolutely concentrate for just 3 minutes, then almost any problem could be solved.”

   “Who said dat? What human mind? What problem?”

   “Have you heard of Erle Stanley Gardner?”

  “ Y’mean dat guy who writes doze Whispering Tales of the Mojave Desert for the Argosy All-Story Mag?”

   Kimura does not answer. “Close your eyes and open your mouth.”

  “Kim! I did dat last night in the dark in bed. If someone sees me doing it to you here, we’ll get arrested.”

  “Shut up and chew!” He puts a macaroon in her mouth.

They sit back enjoying crunchy bits of the brandy-flavored macaroon and he drinking his coffee and she her tea. The marijuanas have burnt to ashes. Ali lights two more, hands one to Kimura and settles back

   Kimura starts: “Erle Staley Gardner’s Utopian wisdom taps a vein of my thought on the vast, untapped capabilities of our brains. Have you read that ninety percent of the human brain goes unused?”

  “That’s a cliché of scientifiction. Who in hell knows what it means!”

  “I am not referring to mysterious brainpower, I mean that every human brain has an under-used capacity for the storage of knowledge. But we have too few Einsteins because this civilization is deluging human brains with repetitive trivia and giving no motivation for a person to fill his brain with useful data, to enjoy learning for its own sake, to cultivate wisdom as a goal of mature aging.”

    Ali drags contentedly on her marijuana and sinks back into her seat's cushion. “Say on, my don.”

  “You and I, Ali-san, are exceptional cases who have escaped the system thanks to a quirk in our upbringing that is allowing us to use our brains to maximum capacity. We do not waste the hours of our day sleeping our lives away and we do not go through the daily useless mindless motions of life and we do not waste our brain storage space on the trivia that is written in newspaper and magazine or shown on a silver screen. Instead we read for knowledge, use speech to gain wisdom, observe our surroundings to accumulate data for making hypotheses, and we sleep only when weary or nothing better to do and not because a clock tells us it is time to sleep. Our cerebral capacities are not going to waste as in the other Homo saps we meet each day.” Kimura’s marijuana is down almost to its end and Ali plucks it from his fingers and stubs it in the ashtray.

  “Wow, Kim! You really fly high! But don’t get too high or you’ll burn yourself, baby.”

  “A German I know, after his third stein of beer, said to me, ‘Kimura, excuse me but you Japanese are lower IQ than Europeans and Americans’."
"I was about to challenge him to fisticuffs when he added, ‘But put ten Japanese together and their combined IQ is greater than the sum of their individual IQs and higher than the combined IQs of equivalent European or American.’”

  “Ah get it!” Ali exclaims. “He meant that the intelligence level of cooperative minds combined is greater than the simple sum intelligence of the individuals as a whole. Yeah, I can see that. So he was not saying Japs are dumber or smarter than other saps; he meant they learn to work together better than anyone anywhere.”

   “Exactly, Ali-san! Our national ability to cooperate with each other to do job and solve problem is a paradigm of how much humanity might be able to accomplish if two or more could just sit down together – and I mean by that, concentrate on and work at the particular problems of our civilization. Buckminster Fuller calls the phenomenon, Synergy.”

  “Hey, Kim, stop pullin’ words on me.” What is ‘paradigm’?”

  “A good model for others to follow.” And ‘Synergy’ means a practical sum in accomplishment of combined actions greater than the arithmetic sum of its parts.”

   “So what is so brilliant about cooperation?”

  “It has not really been tried except in Japan. In the West, individualism is the thing. Everyone is for ‘Yours truly - Me-Me’. Yes, yes, persons do cooperate, but only when forced to, because something really needs to get done. They are always glorifying the lone individual – the inventor like Eli Whitney with the cotton gin. And in Art, what are we forced to admire? Lone genius like Leonardo painting Mona Lisa …”

  “I gather you an’t impressed with individual genius.”

  “No, its vaunted accomplishment is history written by the winners. Take the cotton gin? Whitney developed it on a Georgia slave plantation. He got the patent, and Americans cite him as an example of individual genius but I just read a well researched book by Mr. W.E.B. DuBoise in which he documents that the so-called Whitney cotton gin was actually stolen from the idea of two Negro slaves who shucked cotton on the plantation but since they were slaves it was easy for him to steal their idea. Behind almost every great discovery, invention or work of art are the unsung, the powerless. I do not accept the canard that in the absence of the ‘man of genius’ Homo sapiens would still be running around naked in caves.”

   “Hear! Hear!” Ali exclaims softly, clapping quietly on her fingers. “And here:” She lights a couple of new marijuanas and they sit quietly enjoying the inhalation. In attuned persons, intervals of quiet say more than talking.

18. Big Minx

As the Clipper drones on, its vibrations plus the mix of cannabis and caffeine produce light repose. Stewardess Glo appears. “Excuse my disturbing but we are about to serve dinner.” She pulls out their table and places crisply clean white cloth over it then continues up aisle.

Minutes later she brings tray for two with assorted hors d’oeuvres – black sturgeon eggs, larger red fish eggs and small bundled roast beef, pastrami & salami on triangles of toast - twenty pieces, enough for two controlled appetites. She returns with bottle of Chablis, which she pours like a geisha according to Kimura’s practiced eyes. Before she leaves, Kimura lifts his long-stem glass partly filled with the pale orange-yellow wine and asks “Ah Miss Glo may you be our guest in your leisure time?”

   Glo smiles and lowers left eyelid before heading down aisle.

  Ali comments, "I do believe Big Minx likes you Kim. Well, I can’t blame her. Us brilliant minds think alike.”

19. Midway and Onward

“Midway ho!” shouts Ali coming down the floating stairway. As at Wake they snack at guesthouse and stroll the beach then re-board, and the Clipper makes a perfect take off to start its 9-hour hop to Honolulu with lights out, shades drawn.

                                                ...........

Ali gives huge yawn. Lifting her head from the extended couch where she lies beside Kimura she reaches right hand to window and pulls aside curtain. In first morning light she sees, sliding into view at downward angle, mountains and valleys then harbor approaching rapidly as they start the landing on the smooth blue water with white-tipped surfer waves running to the shore of a breezy palm-dotted beach.
To read next chapter, click 2.20 Glo as Girl Guide/Toilet Bowl Loving