kyoto cacti

Gone Off the Rails

2012-02-08T19:18:00.002+09:00

The other day I am riding on the train to Osaka. The train is at full speed when it suddenly starts braking and hooting and the sound of something like broken glass under our feet is heard. It feels and sounds a bit like your bicycle skidding on the gravel (now I wish I had my IC to record it). After a noisy clutter, a sudden calm. Our train has halted on the Aikawa bridge. It is a sunny, crisp winter day. Ducks are motionless specks on the river surface. Very little moves, outside or inside the carriage. After about a minute we see a driver (presumably) and a young woman in uniform run past our window towards the rear of the train.

Inside, there is pregnant silence. A single young woman breaks it: she rings up her employer to announce her lateness (talking on the mobile phone on Japanese trains is rare and is normally met with mute contempt). Commuters try to avert each other’s eyes, perhaps unwilling to recognize traces of concern. But the more one tries not to notice the more perceptive one becomes. So I end up detecting those slight body movements which are inevitably interpreted as anxiety tics, being somewhat perturbed myself.

Ten or so minutes pass. Passengers are fidgety and growing tense, expecting to hear some sort of nerve-soothing announcement from the conductor. The driver and the same young woman in uniform run past the window in the opposite direction, towards the front of the train. The announcement finally comes on. It is rather a brief one, informing us of a ‘human accident’ – jinshin jiko. This phrase is commonly used in Japan and it usually refers to a suicide on the tracks. If there indeed was one, they must have promptly dealt with the body. But how? The train nevertheless moves on to everyone’s relief. The accident though has upset both the driver’s timetable and the driver himself, as the train horn switches to its loudest mode and is frequently applied for no apparent reason for the rest of the journey.

People throwing themselves under trains is commonplace in Japan. On average up to thousand such deaths each year. These acts are normally considered a public nuisance, if not a taboo. They go unreported in the press. The train companies can claim a compensation fee from the family of a person who committed suicide for disruption in service. Most people prefer not to think about it, and are more likely to give way to their petty annoyances about the delays that these unfortunate acts inevitably bring.

As for the ‘suiciders’ (why has this word not gone mainstream I wonder), these people are supposed to be considered failures. More often than not they are regarded as a disgrace to their friends and families. One of the most common cited reasons for suicide is people’s inability to cope with the pressure at work (the pressure to succeed is probably more conspicuous in Japan than anywhere else), which can lead to one losing their job and the overwhelming feeling of insecurity and unworthiness as a result.

So I got to thinking about success and failure, and that perhaps the line between a success and a failure is much thinner than most people like to think. Who knows how many people who consider themselves successful are in fact potential failures, how many of us unbiased train commuters are potential suicide cases? Is the old adage true then, that failure and success are on the opposite sides of the same coin? Who or what has exactly gone off the rails here? The felones-de-se? The train driver gone berserk with his horn? The thick-skinned society? Or me, writing this rubbish? As Bob Dylan sings on Blood on the Tracks, ‘Everything is a little upside down’. Almost nothing is what it seems to be.

All this talk brings me to two of the most famous fictionalized train suicides: Anna Karenina’s and Celia Johnson’s in Brief Encounter. Actually only the former one is a suicide, the second a rather glorious, failed attempt. The 1935 version of Anna Karenina with Greta Garbo is still the most satisfying one. If ever an actress’s eyes were so expressive!!

The coffee shop scene in Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) on the other hand never fails to lure a tear out of my eye.

Kyoto Sounds I

2012-01-22T12:12:00.001+09:00

The other week I bought this thing called IC Recorder, a very useful gadget for recording sounds and noises in the immediate surroundings. So I recorded some, just outside my building. Now you can listen to three sound extracts off the streets of Kyoto, typical for this time of year. Given they were recorded from the fourth-floor balcony the resulting mp3s are of a very respectable quality.

The first snippet contains a pre-recorded song coming off the truck distributing oil to households which use kerosene stoves, an effective and relatively inexpensive way for heating your home (there is no such thing as central heating system in Japan, and only recently there are radiator-shaped heaters on sale which still work on electricity).

Listen to this lovely sound of a ‘ishiyaki imo’ truck selling hot sweet potatoes for those frozen passers-by willing to pay handsomely for this little delicacy – a single yam will cost you 600 yen, which is about €6! The chant is so resonant that imagination immediately transports me to those times when life used to be slow and simple.

The last sound-bite is of a procession of Shinto monks who occasionally walk the streets in the early morning hours doing their alms-rounds, ‘droning like hornets’ as someone put it. This was my first ever recording done on a very windy day.

Happy Dinoyear

2012-01-03T15:19:00.000+09:00

“Why won't they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, can't they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum.” – said John Dos Passos in 1917. Indeed, why don’t we decide to have an intermission between two years – a few unaccounted for, ‘dead’ days – something like a still screen-caption in the early days of television, with soft background music, as a space to pause and reflect, or simply stop altogether, relinquishing even reflection.

But this question sounds close to absurd in this day and age. How can it have any merit when our lifestyles and social trends are pulling us in just the opposite direction, as many services and businesses are open round the clock (we need warmer shoes and cooler clothes), as people put in more working hours (more money to buy the above), hell even footballers play games on New Year’s Eve nowadays and, what’s worse, many of us are watching (humans get bored easily). On New Year’s Eve we pick a talking head, out of hundreds to pick from, to wish us a prosperous year (humans will talk, no matter what you do to them). On Facebook , we cc the NY cards to hundreds of ‘friends’ we never met (take away their warm houses and comfy chairs and humans will perish). The calendar pages must keep turning over. That’s our lot. We are the prisoners of our own misplaced imagination. And so, the New Year hols are here to stay, for now, each year’s end affording us less and less time to notice it.

Being one of the lucky ones to actually have holidays, I’ve been watching documentaries and pondering DINOSAURS lately. Yes, dinos, those losers. Except they are not, not really. They were simply terribly unlucky with that meteor that’s all. Dinosaurs are the most successful species ever. Not only were they dominant for the staggering 160 million years (compared with the paltry 200,000 years of the existence of Homo sapiens) but they still live on this planet today in the form of birds – the direct descendants of a certain type of dinosaur.

Dinosaur Revolution aired recently on Discovery Channel in Japan (and perhaps worldwide?), is a dino show with a difference: most creatures are given a 'private', commentary-free treatment, with personal dramas and challenges to contend with. The monsters, big and small, are still roaring and thudding about, like in, say, ‘Walking With Dinosaurs’, but much less cartoonishly so. The following scene shows the last hours of one of the last dinosaurs ever - troodon. The troodon gradually realizes that his days are numbered as he seeks shelter from the ubiquitous permafrost. Finally he finds one - inside the giant jaws of another long-dead dinosaur! The symbolism is obvious, yet thoroughly poignant.

Happy DINOYEAR

Feckin Sale

2011-12-31T20:58:00.000+09:00

After spotting the sign I simply had to get into the shop, located in the heart of Kyoto’s shopping district. Whichever profit-minded skull dreamt the sign up certainly does not dream of Stevens’ ‘baboons and periwinkles’. And, judging by the goods (the leopard-patterned leotards, skirts, scarves etc), the clientele (twenty-something flirts donned in kindred mini-pants and platform shoes) and the glittery atmosphere (jazzy brightness, shop assistants pacing frantically about, Sex and the City playing in the corner), neither does the sizeable portion of Kyoto youth.

Christmas Somniloquist

2011-12-29T14:17:00.000+09:00

A Somniloquist

Christmas Eve, near midnight.

The room has fallen silent,

swallowed up by darkness

save for my make-believe face

lit by the laptop light.

I’m half-way through an article

Chinese Taking the World by Storm

when a sudden voice fills the room:

Let’s go out and play!, it says.

I know well where it came from.

I turn round, you’re fast asleep,

your faint-pink, chopped lips

briefly parted by something

dreamt, which shaped

that plunging sound.

The next morning you tiptoe

to the window, draw

the curtains to the bitter fact:

the urban roofs intact,

circumvented by snow.

December 25^th, 2011

You Are Now Leaving Iraq

2011-12-19T22:45:00.000+09:00

http://framework.latimes.com/2011/12/17/iraq-war/#/2

http://warnewsupdates.blogspot.com/2011/11/us-withdrawal-from-iraq-cartoon-pics.html

Saddam

Who would’ve thought that a conversation about poetry could give you an answer about weapons of mass destruction!

— Charles Duelfer, CIA, in National Geographic: Interrogating Saddam (2010)

Iraq, the country he ruled and ruled

as his ‘personal torture chamber’,

has scaled down to a dim prison cell –

his personal torture chamber.

Here, as a former ruler of Iraq,

here he lives on borrowed time,

is brought meals twice a day

is allowed to read books

is lent an ear to his war poetry.

But they are not interested in his poetry.

They are desperate to wring out

a couple of answers from him. Just a couple.

A simple yes or no would do.

Are there weapons under the Iraqi sand?

Is he friends with the sectarians?

He keeps shtum. He keeps reading,

keeps writing his war poetry.

The interrogator tries to win his trust.

He does. George Piro befriends him.

He even renounces a hunger strike for George’s sake.

But still he keeps shtum. And writes poetry

no one is interested in.

The weeks and months wear on.

The time is running out. Under pressure,

under immense pressure,

George Piro finally breaks down

and decides to pay attention to his poetry:

his writing style, his use of metaphor.

It is a metaphor of rifles and swords –

a figure of speech that he used

to scare off the hostile neighbour –

which brings on the truth, yet not a pardon.

It makes the world pause to think:

what if he never made that speech,

what if he didn’t have

‘a very unique way of writing’?

© Branko Manojlovic, 2011

The Night Hitch Died

2011-12-19T00:38:00.000+09:00

Friday night I dream I am in this large farmhouse kitchen, a bicolour cat in my arms. She is old and ailing. I think she is dying. I place her inside a wicker basket then completely cover it with a white hand-crochet lace. I place the basket on the kitchen cupboard. I am satisfied the moggy will die peacefully in here. I turn round to find Christopher Hitchens sitting at the dining table, legs crossed, a glass of what might be bourbon in his hand, lost in thought. I don’t think he says much, if anything.

A few days pass. Or perhaps weeks. In dreams they do. I am back in the same kitchen after being away, god knows where. I notice the basket is still sitting on the cupboard, still covered with the crochet lace. I walk over and remove the cover. The cat is still in here, alive, barely: fur dilapidated, one eye closed, faintly breathing. I am instantly overcome by guilt. In dreams one is. I pick the feline up and try to force-feed her with milk but she coughs it all out. Then I notice Hitch, sitting at the table in the same disinterested way. This time he says something, but I forget what. Maybe he jokes about the cat, how it always was a fussy eater. Maybe he says how death is overrated. At this point the dream starts slipping away. I struggle to stay on. In vain: the morning sunrays see that I am altogether out of it.

A Find

2011-12-11T19:21:00.002+09:00

Imagine you have walked numerous times past a parking lot near your home for the past six or seven years. Just cars, cars and empty spaces. How boring. Then, one cloudy Saturday morning, on your way to a nearby restaurant, you notice something is different, strange. You realize the car park isn’t there any more. Instead, there is a fence which looks it has sprung up overnight. Suddenly your curiosity is awoken and you take interest. You stop by this new fence, and raise yourself up on your toes to take a better look (you don’t believe you are actually doing this).

The sight, however, is totally unexpected: the cars are gone, the car park is no more. The tarmac itself skimmed off from the surface of the earth like fat from the cooking liquid. All that’s left is the brown patch of earth which has somehow extended to the size of a football pitch. You can even see a few people milling about, apparently taking photos (!). As far as you can make out there is nothing to take snaps of, apart from the flat, square blocks of land, a few lunar-like ‘craters’ and a few longish trenches that give the place some sort of coherence. You must find out what the hell’s going on. You walk round the long fence until you reach a white tent which has been placed at the improvised entrance of what must be, as you begin to suspect, a brand-new archeological site. Soon enough you are handed an A3 size paper with the whole detailed explanation. Alas, you are unable to read the characters, and you do not speak their language very well. So you take a walk around the site, you take a photo or two and when, finally, your curiosity gets the better of you, you start looking for someone to speak to. The choices are limited. You turn to a couple of elderly gentlemen whose animated conversation and their outer appearance – tweed jackets, specs, rucksacks – leads you to suspect they could be knowledgeable or even speak English. As it turns out, you are right as far as their familiarity with the goings on. They tell you in their language (you ask them to speak very slowly) the place has been found to be a thousand-year-old settlement, or rather a group of houses which used to be part of an affluent neighbourhood in the ancient city of Heian-kyō.

The city in question, of course, is present day Kyōto. The Saturday in question is yesterday, December 10^th, 2011. The patch of land does exist and has been dug up apparently by the students from the Bunkyo university. Its building is soon to be erected on the very spot (imagine the conservationists canvassing against it and collecting signatures for an ill-fated petition). The site, as my photo attests, is nothing to write home about, yet it should look remarkable to people who have lived for years in the neighbourhood. It is rather exhilarating to know that one thousand years ago here existed a community of aristocrats, and imagine their powdered faces and blackened teeth, their painted eyebrows, their shiny black hair, their multi-layered robes displaying seasonal colours. Imagine walking along a narrow Heian street in the moonlight, and sighting a woman who, having nothing better to do, is watching the shadow of a pine branch, imbued with the sweet futility of existence.

A woodblock print from 'One Hundred Aspects of the Moon' by Yoshitoshi

P.S. Today, Sunday, the site is already off-limits! Talk about the world of impermanence.

Socrates vs Socrates

2011-12-06T17:26:00.002+09:00

As of yesterday, December 5^th, 2011, if you googled ‘Death of Socrates’ the top couple of results would not be about the famous Greek, but that of a Brazilian football hero: Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira. For those of us who grew up in the early 80s playing footy in the park or the nearest parking lot, the mention of Brazilian Socrates inevitably brings back memories of one irretrievably lost sporting era when football (and most other sports) could indeed be a beautiful game, when creativity on the pitch and loyalty to clubs and fans came before financial gain. Just watch the Brazilian side on youtube at the two World Cups – Spain ’82 and Mexico ’86 respectively – the improvisation, the risk-taking, the ball-control, the whole team one well-oiled machine made up of free-spirited, individual talent. Mind you, not as individualistic as that Greek team in Monty Python’s Philosophy Football sketch (in which Socrates of all philosophers scores with that masterly diving header!).

Little did we know, those of us living outside of Brazil, that Socrates the footballer (also a qualified medical doctor) was politically active, playing a very prominent role in dismantling the Brazilian military regime, which eventually collapsed in 1985, and helping to bring in democracy and prosperity to the masses. This he did by forming the Corinthian Democracy Movement in the early 80s with the aim of spreading the powers of majority rule:

"Corinthians were a superb side at the time, winning the Sao Paulo state championship in 1982 and 1983, and their blend of stylish, attacking football married with the political campaigning of Socrates and his colleagues captured the imagination of many. To spread their message the Corinthians Democracy Movement emblazoned the clubs kits with political slogans on match days, and huge pro-democracy banners were erected at their Pacaembu stadium. The movement also attracted the support of artists and intellectuals, as the political left latched onto the power of football in spreading the message for change. In 1982, despite warnings from the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) not to interfere in political issues, the Corinthians Democracy Movement agreed that the club would take to the field in shirts bearing the slogan “Vote on the Fifteenth”, urging Brazilian citizens to make their voice heard in the upcoming elections."

You can read the informative article in full here: http://fiveinmidfield.com/2011/03/27/socrates-and-the-corinthians-democracy-movement-how-football-helped-to-change-a-country/

So, what do two Socrateses, the Athenian and the Brazilian, apart from their name, have in common? A few parallels (however historically unverifiable): both men were physically strong and vigorous; both were courageous – the Athenian as a hoplite war veteran, the Brazilian as a political activist as well as the on-pitch adventurer; both strove towards achieving a fairer society, albeit by the apparently opposing, or at least different, means – the Greek had issues with the Athenian democracy of his time, mistrusted the majority rule (paradoxically considered as probably the first ‘free-speech martyr’) and was rather concerned with the moral and intellectual betterment, ‘welfare of the souls’, of his fellow citizens, whereas the Brazilian Socrates was a champion of the poor and the underprivileged; and judging by their actions, both men in their final hour faced death without much fear or regret: the Greek accepting, even welcoming, the death sentence, the Brazilian apparently a victim of his bohemian lifestyle. Whatever the parallels, straight or reverse, both men, as poet Kathy Evans Bush might say, acted like human beings. Curiously enough, she takes another Greek, Nestor, ‘the grandfatherly blabbermouth’, when she cooks up a poem from Nestor’s ‘point of view’ about yet another athlete (a coincidence?), LeBron James. The poem is called ‘The Iliad’, and the final lines go

Pro teams used to practice in
The gym where I taught high school.
Chamberlain, Chet Walker, Jerry West,
I saw them all up close and in truth
The only one who acted like a human
Being was Tom Boerwinkle so let's have
A poem contest for the man from Tennessee!

[http://baroqueinhackney.com]

In Memoriam: Petar Kralj (1941-2011)

2011-11-18T18:37:00.002+09:00

Petar Kralj (1941-2011), that splendid figure of Yugoslav and Serbian theatre and film, is no longer with us. Who knows, by now he might have arrived at the Elysium café and joined his ex-Yugoslav thespian friends, feeding them the latest news from the old country. Unassuming as they come, Kralj was of that rare artistic breed who was able to project his private, almost tangible timidity and modesty into his roles, his sad azure eyes adding depth and a wistful dimension to his characters. Petar achieved one of his most memorable roles – and there were quite a few – in the film ‘Poseban Tretman’ a.k.a. ‘Special Treatment’ a.k.a. ‘What is it that attracts a human being to drink?’ (1980). Here he plays a failed actor, now an alcoholic convalescent who, as part of a travelling troupe, performs instructive sketches for the benefit of local communities. The following clip contains two great scenes. The first takes place at a restaurant where a snooty doctor, played by Ljuba Tadic, is lecturing an old man on ethics and integrity, while flirting with a blonde across the table (Milena Dravić, who that year won Palme d’Or for best supporting actress). The second scene has Petar Kralj stuttering Shakespeare (in Serbian!) while sitting on top of a cabinet, holding a carton of natural yoghurt. With English subtitles.

My tribute for the wonderful man and artist. Click for better view:

Daybreak

2011-11-12T23:44:00.001+09:00

Daybreak

Waking up well before dawn to the tune of a wake-up ring I ordered just a few hours ago

feels like a day’s unfinished business. A couple of hours later our minibus bound for the Bodrum airport, having been delayed by sheep of the hazardous dirt-road, makes a fifteen-minute loo break (hardly anyone gets off).

The garden-restaurant by the lake Bafa, bustling with tourists when we made a stop heading in the opposite direction a week ago, is now shut but for a single lightbulb-lit counter selling exorbitant crisps and coffee. Our driver has disappeared from view. A few of us pace about aimlessly, hands in pockets. We count minutes, seconds. My empty stomach begs me to get a bag of Walkers’ Salt and Vinegar. From a coop nearby a black cock is announcing dawn before it has a chance to announce itself.

I walk over to the lakeside. The water is one with the leaden sky: no horizon, but the glossy blackness of the waves like hurried volcanic surfs, albeit moving up the greyscale chart by each passing minute. I take out the camera, hoping to snap the daybreak in the making, those last dour ghosts of yesterday retreating, sinking like dead fish before the light rears its head behind the thawing hills.

Greek Tragedy

2011-11-10T00:39:00.000+09:00

Two images normally spring to mind once we hear the name of Constantine P. Cavafy: his disarmingly sensual homoerotic vignettes, and his innovative poems concerned with some of the finer, if less-famed, points in Greek history. In the light of the recent political turmoil perhaps some Greek poets/intellectuals might be wondering what kind of poems Cavafy would end up writing about, say, the bailout plan by Merkel/Sarkozy or the inner workings of the Greek parliament. For one, as Greeks’ political self-determination once again hangs in the air, Greece does seem to be standing at a crossroads of sorts – whether it be the country’s potential exit from the Euro project, or its acceptance of the austerity measures – both of which would likely lead to the advanced stages of belt-tightening. There seems to be no end in sight for the current Greek tragedy: people’s houses are being impounded, personal debts are mounting, many have lost jobs or are about to – the unemployment rate is at a record high 16%. The young and the highly educated are setting off abroad – an estimated 10% of university graduates leave the country each year. The pressing needs of the majority are financial security, careers, prosperity. Indeed it is not easy to see how Cavafy’s view ‘at a slight angle to the universe’ would help matters.

Cavafy was a poet of peripheries: his homosexuality, his Alexandrianism, his interest in the less-prominent historical figures, his imaginative reenactments of the myth. As E.M. Forster put it, not necessary unfavourably, ‘Such a writer can never be popular. He flies both too slowly and too high. Whether subjective or objective, he is equally remote from the bustle of the moment, he will never compose either a Royalist or a Venizelist Hymn. He has the strength (and of course the limitations) of the recluse, who, though not afraid of the world, always stands at a slight angle to it […]’¹.

Cavafy Etching by David Hockney, 1967

As for me, I’d much rather read Cavafy’s poems than some disheartening report on the latest squabble in the Greek legislative assembly. Cavafy’s characters, real or imaginary, are rarely concerned with their financial stability and that alone makes them more interesting, more human. The poet’s sympathies usually rest with the downtrodden, the marginalized, protagonist lurking in the shadows, earning just enough to get by, ‘putting / the pure sensuality of his pure flesh / above his honour and reputation’ (‘Days of 1896’). In ‘Orophernis’ (1914), money, or rather a drachma coin, serves as a springboard for Cavafy’s musings on the Hellenic pride, toned down by his trademark irony. The poem is a curious amalgam of the mundane, historical fact and erotic idealization. Here are the closing lines:

His end must have been recorded somewhere only to be lost;

or maybe history passed over it

and rightly didn’t bother to notice

a thing so trivial.

The figure on this four drachma coin,

something of whose young charm can still be seen,

a ray of his poetic beauty—

this sensuous image of an Ionian boy,

this is Orophernis, son of Ariarathis.²

There is lots of material in Cavafy’s oeuvre, especially in his historical poems, for the contemporary reader to try and unpick, from which a few parallels between the then and the now could be drawn. Cavafy was particularly attracted by the Hellenistic and the Byzantine eras, often by a certain turning point in history when the Hellenistic world surrenders on the military and political front (at the same time struggling to keep its cultural and spiritual integrity), when the Greek identity, as well as survival, is at stake. It is the nation’s moments of crisis, and the effect that the crisis has on the citizens’ morale, that Cavafy is often drawn to. And more often then not it is corruption, hubris and decadence of those in charge that lead to a civilization’s downfall:

He’s lost his old fire, his courage.
Now his tired, almost decrepit body
will be his first concern. And the rest of his life he’ll spend
without worrying. So Philip says, anyway.
Tonight he’s playing a game with dice;
he’s in a mood to amuse himself.
Cover the table with roses.

[…]

Let the banquet begin. Slaves! The music, the lights!

from The Battle of Magnesia³

In 1928 Cavafy wrote In a Large Greek Colony, 200 B.C., a somewhat unusual poem in that, although no name is attached to the colony and despite the title, the issues of governing and economics addressed seem to speak directly of the 20^th century political intolerance, totalitarianism, extreme radicalism. Cavafy argues against the ‘Political Reformer’ and his enforced administrative changes in a gently ironic tone, calling for equanimity and patience instead. This poem’s strong anti-bureaucrat stance fits in nicely with today’s Eurozone predicament, and can well speak to the 21^st century reader, Greek or not Greek. Here is the poem in full:

In a Large Greek Colony, 200 B.C.E.

There is not the slightest doubt
that things in the Colony don't go as one would wish,
and though we move forward, anyway,
perhaps, as not a few think, the time has come
for us to bring in a Political Reformer.

Yet the obstacle and difficulty
is that they make a big deal
out of everything, these Reformers.
(It would be a stroke of good luck
if one never needed them.) Everything,
every little thing, they ask about and examine,
and instantly radical reforms come to mind
and they demand they be implemented without delay.

They lean toward sacrifice.
Give up that property of yours,
your owning it is risky:
such possessions are harmful to the Colonies.
Give up that income
and that coming from it,
and this third one, as a natural consequence.
They are essential, but it can't be helped;
They create an adverse liability for you.

And as they proceed in their inspection,
they find (then find again) needless things,
which they demand must go —
things that nevertheless are hard to dismiss.

And when, with good luck, they finish their work,
having ordered and pared everything down to the last detail,
they leave, taking away their rightful wages, as well.
We'll see what remains, after
so much expert surgery.

Perhaps the time had not yet come.
Let's not rush; haste is a dangerous thing.
Premature measures bring regret.
Certainly and unfortunately, there is much disorder in the Colony.
But is there anything human without imperfection?
And, anyway, look, we're moving forward.⁴

I wish more people read Cavafy. I wish more Greeks read Cavafy. If your ‘average Joe’ in Greece read a poem of Cavafy a day, who knows, it might make him want to look at the current political difficulties from a slight angle, even help one reinvent his day.

Post Scriptum — I visited Greece on three of four occasions. My memories are sketchy. From the late 70s I remember our little cottage off the beaten track on the island of Thasos, the swarms of moths vying for space around the lightbulb above the entrance door; waking up to the sight of the long line of ants from one end of the ceiling to the other; the bee-stings all over my nine-year-old body (honey is the island’s major produce). I remember Greek men incessantly playing tavli in downtown taverns (not quite as pitiful as Cavafy’s ‘old man’), and cart-sellers shouting ‘karpouzia, karpouzia!’ (watermelons) each morning. From the late 90s I remember gangs of sinister-looking stray dogs roaming the streets of Thessaloniki, a rusted balustrade and a British-style, separate-taps basin in my seedy hotel room. I recall a sea promenade in the village of Neos Marmaras, Halkidiki, where I saw a shooting star one evening and at once sat down to write a love letter to a certain R.; I also recall a soft-cotton navy-blue hat I bought in the village, subsequently lost and have been looking for ever since.

Notes:

1 – E.M. Forster: The Poetry of C.P. Cavafy, ‘The Athenaeum’, April 1919; reprinted in Modernism, Edinburgh University Press, 1998

2 and 3 – transl. by E. Keeley / P. Sherrard

4 – transl. by Aliki Barnstone

Staying Interactive: Post Scriptum

2011-11-09T22:09:00.001+09:00

As a fitting and timely post-scriptum to my previous post, this story came out in The Guardian last week, concerning a certain art gallery cleaner who thought a sculpture of a German artist Martin Kippenberger needed a bit of good old scrubbing:

“The work, called When It Starts Dripping From the Ceiling (Wenn's anfängt durch die Decke zu tropfen), comprised a rubber trough placed underneath a rickety wooden tower made from slats. Inside the trough, Kippenberger had spread a layer of paint representing dried rainwater. He thought it was art: the cleaner saw it as a challenge, and set about making the bucket look like new.” [http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/nov/03/overzealous-cleaner-ruins-artwork]

A very similar thing happened in 1986 to a ‘grease stain’ by Joseph Beuys, famous for his environmental pieces; to a plastic bag in 2004 at Tate Britain, a work by Gustav Metzger; to Damien Hirst’s beer bottles and coffee cups in 2001. In 1961 Piero Manzoni of the Conceptual Art movement, however, managed to flog his ‘art’ – tins containing the artist’s excrement – before an anxious cleaner could get too close. Incidentally, two of the tins were auctioned for €124,000 in 2007 and £97,250 in 2008 respectively. As to the contents of the tins, it seems they indeed contain crap – art as crap, crap as art, crap art: “Manzoni's girlfriend Nanda Vigo, who helped him produce the cans, claimed the contents really were faeces. Vigo's assertion is disputed by Manzoni's brother and sister, but some cans have leaked and confirmed they are indeed faeces — though whether human or animal has not been verified. An art dealer from the Gallery Blu in Milan claims to have detected a faecal odour emanating from a can.” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist’s_Shit]
One can only imagine what Nanda's 'help' actually consisted of.

Staying Interactive

2011-10-30T23:57:00.005+09:00

Ever since Duchamp threw the bottle rack and the urinal in our faces ready-made objects never looked the same again – for better or for worse. He was most likely thinking along the lines of ‘If it’s signed and you can’t piss in it, it’s got to be art’¹, and that’s all very well. Still, groundbreaking ideas like Duchamp’s work only so far. It doesn’t mean that if you or I, in Duchamp’s words, ‘took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view - created a new thought for that object'², it would ever make it to a gallery, let alone be considered art. I can’t simply place my old sock or a burnt frying pan on the pavement and put up a flashing green sign in front of it. No, that would not work because the aura of the artist, and even more the aura of an exhibition space remain and will always be the determining factors. Then there are further, no less important questions like: what if the objects we consider art are in fact not? Why, for instance, Tracy Emin’s unmade Bed is art and my unmade bed isn’t? Why is, or why should, my bed be more, or less, displaced than hers? Recently a friend of mine overheard two people in a gallery commenting at great length on the significance of a baby pram which stood on the floor amongst other various objet d’art, and while they were establishing the pram’s fine points of interconnectedness a mother came back with her baby and walked off with the pram, leaving our experts dumbfounded. Duchamp:

People took modern art very seriously when it first reached America because they believed we took ourselves very seriously (…) A great deal of modern art is meant to be amusing. If Americans would simply remember their own sense of humour instead of listening to the critics, modern art will come into its own.³

Duchamp furthered his readymades in the 1920s when he used glass plates to build motorized optical machines as experiments in optical illusion. Rotary Glass Plates (1920), composed of five glass plates painted in black and white, invites the viewer to become an active participant in the art by turning on the optical machine then observing it from one meter away. From that distance the rotating device would create an illusion of continuous concentric circles all on the same plane. Marcel didn’t consider these as ‘art’ per se as he was merely interested in the inconsistencies of the human eye, i.e. the fact that the eye retains an image for a fraction of a second after it has disappeared. Nevertheless, his mechanical contraptions from the 1920s were the true forerunners of what we now label ‘interactive art’. Incidentally, Duchamp’s experiments are apparently considered to stand for ‘pre-historic screensavers’⁴, anticipating the free-associative, kaleidoscopic moving images on our computer screens some seventy years later – remember After Dark, Ribbons, Flying in Space etc.? Similarly, Duchamp’s ‘Optical Disks’ and ‘Disks Bearing Spirals’ directly led to the first ‘3D’ film ever shot – Anémic Cinéma (1926). This six-minute film has alternating shots of moving spirals which at times create a 3D effect, and shots of texts mounted on rotating disks which the viewers read from the outside inwards. The text sets are in French and – being French and Duchamp’s – carry a potent erotic subtext, which, again, requires the viewer’s interpretation.

Personally I am all for audience interaction: the viewer becoming part of the view, the visitor becoming part of an exhibit. Recently I visited, and became a willing part of, an installation at Kyoto Art Centre (for those of you who live in Kyoto, this is a converted primary school – well worth a visit if only for its Meiji era corridors and classrooms with creaky floorboards) whereby the audience participated by moving body parts and thus creating weird sounds and noises. My ‘performance’ was (un)luckily captured on camera

A few lines I wrote after the experience:

Duped

after Tadasu Takamine’s ‘Japan Syndrome, The Other Side of the Ball’

I get myself duped, and voluntarily so.

Room One sports a screen

flanked by smaller screens. I stand

on a dotted line, in front a sensor,

limbs twitching undulating

into sound-shrapnel of reckless din –

a New Millennium Theremin.

Room Two across the courtyard

sports a screen, invariably blurry.

On it not a thing moves

till a stranger enters Room One

flapping her limbs about

like a more amiable fool.

Got ourselves duped, and happily so.

References:

1 – R. Appignanesi: Introducing Postmodernism, Icon Books, 1999, p.35.

2 – 'The Richard Mutt Case', The Blind Man, New York, no.2, May 1917, p.5.

3 – Tomkins, Calvin: Duchamp. A Biography. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. p. 226

[http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_5/articles/dur/dur7.html]

4 – http://transmissiondifficulties.vancouverartinthesixties.com/images/ScreenSaver.pdf

On the Big Island

2011-10-01T14:29:00.002+09:00

Possessed

By the coastal road

the large trees barely stand

wrapped and stifled

by the orange cobwebs

of Pele’s hair.

Like handsome Ohi’a

the trees look helpless

forever transfigured

by the outrageous

air plant from abroad.

I listen to tree frogs’

ko-kee, ko-kee

in darkness. Like me

they are guests,

albeit permanent.

I am a man possessed,

trying hard to pinpoint

the song’s source,

detect its distant

insular dialect.

Spanish moss is an epiphyte which absorbs nutrients (especially calcium) and water from the air and rainfall. Spanish moss is colloquially known as "air plant". Spanish moss was introduced to Hawaii in the 19th century, and became a popular ornamental and lei plant. Recently it is occasionally called "Pele's hair" after Pele the Hawaiian goddess. The term "Pele's hair" usually refers to a type of filamentous volcanic glass.

When Coqui tree frogs accidentally arrived in Hawaii with shipments of plants from Florida or Puerto Rico, the response was ballistic. The mayor of Hawaii declared a state of emergency. Scientists feared the sky was falling, and that the coquis, which eat lots of insects, would decimate the insect population to the point of starving all other insectivorous creatures. The sound of the frogs, a two-toned "ko-KEE", was described as a "shrill shriek" guaranteed to keep everyone awake at night, run down property values, and drive away tourists.

Ironically, this same coqui frog is the national animal of Puerto Rico, its native land. In fact, Puerto Ricans love this frog and its chirping sound so much that it is honoured in local folklore. People describe the nighttime sound of the coqui as soothing and necessary for sleep, and Puerto Rican travellers often bring recordings of coquis with them when away from home to help them sleep. [http://www.hawaiiancoqui.org/]

Back in the Day

2011-08-27T15:07:00.000+09:00

Back in the day they built scores of Socio-Realistic, khaki-grey, blocks in Belgrade. One such, dubbed televizor, for its windows the shape of a TV screen, stood out as an aesthetic curio. The four-storey block our family lived in was of yellow-grey tint, flanked by trees and us kids playing footy in communal parks.

Back in the day people tended to keep their front door unlocked. A neighbour would knock and step in for chitchat, followed by Turkish coffee cup reading. If a doorbell buzzed, it was either a/ a postman b/ a Gypsy asking for alms or c/ a neighbour returning a hairdryer. Crime was as rare as quail eggs. Instead there were graffiti upon the walls normally in black or creamy white, commemorating love or spite: M. LOVES H.; M. IS MORON.

In padlocked cellars we kept fishing rods, sledges, muckboots, sauerkraut barrels — why padlocked was anyone’s guess. All slept behind wooden bars, like captives forgotten most of the year.

In our block’s cellar this green powdery stuff sat in one corner, a note above it read: ‘Rat Poison, Keep Away’. Tanya once told me she’d seen the little beasts. But I think she made it up just to keep the conversation alive. We would sometimes sit and chat, Tanya and me, at the building entry on the chilly flight of stairs. Our bums were constantly cold. The hall lights would switch off automatically: once they did, we’d switch to a whisper, hoping the light wouldn’t come back on to break our tall enamoured shadows. After Tanya and I bade goodnight I’d leap three steps at a time in pitch dark up to the second floor, knock excitedly. Mum would squint as I stepped into the light.

Back from Hols

2011-08-21T23:25:00.001+09:00

Back from a three-week holiday in Serbia and Turkey. After a two-day-three-aeroplane journey I am so knackered my senses ignore a foul stench coming from the toilet drain. The walls have absorbed the Japanese summer humidity. On the balcony a cicada, dead on its back. After three days I am still battling a numbing jetlag/stomachache. First night I sleep 14 hours. Second night a deer walks into my dream. I think it is female. She has big chestnut eyes, is standing on top of a flat mushroom-shaped glacier sniffing my bruised hands. I was most likely on the run (recently read Stevenson’s Kidnapped, there is a scene in which David Belfour and Alan Breck are hiding from redcoats on top a flat rock). I wake up mid-dream which happens to be middle of the night, cannot sleep afterwards. Third night I manage to clock 7 hours.

The holidays, by the way, were great. The highlights were visits to Ephesus and Pamukkale about which I tend to write at some point. The whole trip to Europe has been marked, if anything, by unrelated hurts and deaths, especially on television. The recurrences were sporadic, incidental, and perhaps for that reason bore an odd unifying quality. Examples:

In my hotel room TV is on for no apparent reason and Harry Potter’s gothic shadows and hairy spiders only serve to suddenly remind me that I forgot a certain book on the beach: Poe’s famous scarab tale (Did you know that R.L. Stevenson acknowledged Poe’s story’s direct influence on the skeleton in his Treasure Island? Neither did I.)

On CNN Jeff Bridges unravels a ‘theory’ how marriage is one big step towards death (Sure, Jeff).

Riots in Hackney on the Beeb (used to live, eat and love, in Navarino Road).

The dead city of Ephesus.

On the plane from Moscow to Seoul I pick a documentary on Hemingway, who survived a plethora of diseases, from anthrax to dysentery to pneumonia (check out this incredible list of Hemingway’s hurts: http://www.hoffstrizz.com/2010/03/a-list-of-hurts-and-diseases-suffered-by-ernest-hemingway.html), two plane crashes, encounters with bulls, sharks and lions, but not his own shotgun (I recall Norman Lewis strongly hinting at Hemingway’s ultimate inability to cope with deterioration of his bodily functions).

Ah, and that cicada on its back.

Monsters & Fangs

2011-07-16T18:14:00.003+09:00

A SAVAGE fish described as more terrifying than a piranha is on Queensland’s doorstep and authorities fear it may soon be here. The vicious giant snakehead, which has been the star of a horror movie trilogy, eats everything it comes across and has even been reported to kill people. The monster from south-east Asia has a mouth crammed with fearsome teeth, can “crawl” on land and survive out of water for up to four days.

http://jamesboard.wordpress.com/2010/04/07/come-to-australia-you-might-accidentally-get-killed/

This snakefish was caught in England. In an article entitled Killer fish terrifies Britain News.Com (as in Rupert Murdoch) describes that snakefish as “A savage fish that eats everything it comes across, including people. The discovery of the fish is reported to have caused widespread panic among conservationists and anglers. An Environmental Agency source described the snakefish as “the ultimate invasive species”. The source said that if snakefish begin breeding in the area it will be a disaster.

http://theframeproblem.wordpress.com/2008/02/19/the-snakefish-a-concerning-ecological-threat/272/

The Eight-Forked Serpent (Yamata no Orochi)

‘[…] its eyes were red as the winter cherry, and pine trees and mosses grew on its back, while firs sprouted on each of its heads. As it crawled, it stretched over eight valleys and eight hills, and its belly was always flecked with blood. In seven years this beast had devoured seven maidens, the daughters of a king, and in the eighth year was about to eat up the youngest, named Princess-Comb-Ricefield. The princess was saved by a storm-god who bore the name of Brave-Swift-Impetuous-Male. This knight built a circular enclosure of wood with eight gates and eight platforms at each gate. On the platforms he set tubs of sake. The Eight-Forked Serpent came and dipped its head into each of the tubs, gulped down the sake and was soon fast asleep. Then the knight lopped all of the heads, a river of blood springing from the necks. In the serpent’s tail a sword was found…’

from The Book of Imaginary Beings by J.L.Borges (pp. 55-6)

Yamata no Orochi by Toyohara Chikanobu (1838–1912)

It took me couple of minutes to realize all 8 heads are in here! Click on the pic and time yourself.

* (caption taken from http://themurdochempireanditsnestofvipers.blogspot.com)

Blue Riders

2011-07-07T23:05:00.002+09:00

Last Friday’s visit to Kandinsky retrospective at ‘Hyogo Bijutsukan’, which revolved around his Blue Rider period (1911-14), made me reread extracts from his essay published in the Blaue Reiter Almanac (1912), which in turn were reproduced in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (one of the few theory books I shipped from UK to Japan nine years ago).

For the uninitiated, the Blue Rider was a coterie of artists, a movement of sorts, including among others, Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Gabriele Münter, August Macke, Jawlensky, Schoenberg. The group published an Almanac and held two exhibitions (WW1 cut the movement short). Kandinsky's writing on the problem of form in The Blue Rider Almanac is considered as one of the first and best defences as well as promotions of abstract art, his ideas quickly catching up especially in the English speaking world. Here are a couple of extracts from the Almanac:

If the reader is able to free himself for a while from his own wishes, his own thoughts, his own feelings and skims through this book, going from a votive picture to Delaunay, from Cezanne to a Russian folk print, from a mask to Picasso, from a glass painting to Kubin, etc., etc., then his soul will experience many vibrations and he will enter into the world of art. Here he will not be bothered by outrageous defects or aggravating errors. Instead he will experience a spiritual plus instead of a minus.

[…]

The artist, whose life is comparable to a child’s in many respects, frequently can reach the inner sound more easily than anyone else. In this respect it is especially interesting to see how the composer Arnold Schönberg paints — simply and confidently. As a rule he is interested only in the inner sound. He omits, without regard, all embellishments and refinements and ‘poorest’ form in his hands becomes the richest (his self-portrait, for example).

[…]

In order to ‘understand’ [an abstract] picture the same liberation as in realism is necessary, i.e., here too one must learn to hear the whole world exactly as it is without any representational interpretation. And in such work abstract forms (lines, planes, spots etc.) are not important as such, but only as inner sound, as life.

For Kandinsky it seems colours and sound are one, or at least interchangeable. Schoenberg ‘paints’ with his music, and in turn music permeates abstract art. Kandinsky, himself an accomplished musician — he learned the piano and cello at an early age — claimed that when he saw colour he heard music. He even went as far as associating colour tone with timbre, hue with pitch, and saturation with the volume of sound!

Kandinsky incorporated musicality early on in his pointillistic works, employing mottled dots and blobs of colour. One such work was on display at Hyogo Gallery: Russian Beauty in a Landscape (1905), through which, in Kandinsky’s own words, he tried to ‘express the musical spirit of Russia’. These referential qualities, as we know, are gone once Kandinsky embraces abstraction: the later paintings are left to their own, self-referential, vibratory devices (or the lack of them). I stayed with one such painting — Composition VII — for some time and the experience was rewarding as I was able to draw out a host of ‘small pleasures’ from the lines and shapes dancing, floating, hovering, rebounding or blending into each other.

But no matter how invigorating Kandinsky’s abstract work may be, I think one should be always on guard against the overinterpretation, careful not to ‘overstay’ a painting’s welcome. One of the pleasures of abstract painting, after all, is that you can always come back to it and detect musical intricacies anew. Actually, I’ll be totally honest here: the main reason I went to the exhibition (it took me good two hours by train in one direction) was to see Paul Klee’s painting Cacti (1912). Or let’s put it this way: if it hadn’t been for Klee I doubt I would have gone. Yes, it is all to do with my fixation with the plant, with the fact it was painted by my current painting hero, and of course with the title of this blog.

I was immediately attracted to Klee’s cactussen for their subdued colours, the picture unusually dark for such prickly, palpable species, as if saying ‘don’t waste time on me, I am obviously not that special’. Yet the more I looked at the painting the more I got convinced there was more to it than just the sinister-looking pots — who can tell for sure what those teeth-like projections inside the middle pot are? And where is the blinking cactus in that one?! Isn’t it altogether missing? It made me feel a bit disconcerted at the time. Days later I came across this anecdote which, I felt, almost vindicated my previous ignorance. In 1895 Kandinsky saw Monet’s Haystacks at Giverny, after which experience he later stated: "It was from the catalogue I learned this was a haystack. I was upset I had not recognized it. I also thought the painter had no right to paint in such an imprecise fashion. Dimly I was aware too that the object did not appear in the picture..." (http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/kandinsky/).

I was also happy to see a number of paintings by Kandinsky’s friends from the Blue Rider group — Münter, Macke, Jawlensky. One that struck me in particular was Gabriele Münter’s Jawlensky, Werefkin (1908-9), in which she paints the couple in a leisurely yet rather enigmatic pose while resting upon the green hillside. One is never completely sure as to the nature of their current sentiment — whether they are in love, or upset with each other, plain indifferent, whatever. The blank faces and plain flowers may add to the feeling of tranquillity, but for me the absence of facial features only raises the emotional stakes in this kind of painting. And then there is that ominous-looking yellow bolt that splits the sky…

My tour ended some 90 minutes and three gallery rooms later, still enough to tire me out as I hardly could stand on my two feet. I ended up buying a Kandinsky A4 folder, a B2 Blue Rider poster (which now hangs in my room), and a ‘3D Stereo Viewer’. Kandinsky would have been proud. Well, I came across this telling anecdote related to the old man Kandinsky’s worsening eyesight (and some would say worsening art).

The year was 1944. Kandinsky had died on December 3rd of that year after coping with failing health since early March. By the summer his eyes had become almost permanently half-closed. After his death his widow Nina explained that he possessed the rare talent of being able to represent in his mind the world of his paintings with their colours and their forms, exactly as he later set them down on canvas. It has been suggested that these forms, their myriads of rings swimming across the surface of the work, were the effects of phosphenes that can be impressed on the eyeball when the eyes are closed. Towards the end of his life Kandinsky would have been painting what he was seeing with his eyes closed. That might suggest that he lost his grip on reality to some extent, but Nina says not.

http://picsandpoems.blogspot.com/2009/03/kandinsky-did-it-first.html

‘I shut my eyes in order to see’, said Gauguin. Finally, do have a look at this cool kinetic Kandinsky. Who knows, this is how the man himself might have seen it with the help of those phosphenes.

The Feather

2011-06-26T10:48:00.002+09:00

Once a child, always a child. This morning I am drawn to a brownish feather blown over onto the balcony floor, where I’ve noticed it gently swirling. I grab it in midair, hold it up by the shaft, like a writing quill, sniff the vane, straighten out the barbs. It is a fine specimen, caramel and chocolate brown around the edges, off-white in the middle. I wonder what kind of bird it may have come from – a brown pigeon? I suddenly wince as I hear concerned voices in my head: ‘Don’t do that! It might be infected with avian flu or something!’ I am instantly ashamed by this cowardly, nonsensical thought. Anyway, even if there were any bacteria in there I already inhaled them. So, what next? For a moment I consider throwing the feather back to the winds. If only the bird would come back I’d reattach the feather to its wing. Well, it’s on my desk now, inside a pen holder. I may photograph it, or write a haiku.

Three stages of self-awareness: the child, the schooled adult, the would-be artist. Once a child, always a child.

Sunday, June 26^th, 2011

Bamboonery - Part 3

2011-06-26T00:21:00.000+09:00

Some ‘bamboo verse’ by early Japanese women poets:

Let us plant

in a warrior's garden.

May you become bows, may you become arrows

clumps of bamboo

of ten thousand years.

Takabatake Shikibu (d.1881)

I wake, with no one around the room is clean.
As always I rub the musk ink, and it sounds swish-swish.
The bamboo, not waiting for the moon in the window,
in light shades, aslant, aslant, emerges through my hand.

Ema Saiko (1787-1861; from ‘Breeze Through Bamboo’)

What are you saying?

That we can't meet –

not even for a time

brief as the space between joints

on the reeds of Naniwa?

Lady Ise (c. 875-938)

Tonight

as hail falls

on bamboo leaves

rustling, rustling

how can I sleep alone?

Izumi Shikibu (c. 970 – ?)

Who might dwell there?

Who has fixed his abode

at the foot of the hill,

with none for neighbour

save a lovely bamboo grove?

Abutsu-ni (c. 1222-1283)

[http://www.earlywomenmasters.net/masters/bamboo/index.html]

The great Basho famously wrote: “Learn of the pine from the pine; learn of the bamboo from the bamboo. And in doing so, you must put your subjective preoccupations to one side. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn.” This call to a total immersion in nature — physical, sensual, spiritual — is also a direct allusion to the then prevailing formal rigidity of both renga and haikai, the popular poetic forms whereby groups of people composed linked verse following specific rules and regulations. Rules and regulations — yuck. The ‘preoccupations’ are the synonym for any poet’s straightforward interpretations of nature limited by the detachment, by the absence of what Basho elsewhere calls a ‘wind-swept spirit’ of his poetic persona. The logic of Basho’s message thus goes something like this: break with the current tradition (‘preoccupations’), and develop an independent spirit by embracing/exploring nature to the full and your poetry is on the right path towards originality. Basho: “The first task for each artist is to overcome the barbarian … heart and mind, to become one with nature”. Note Basho’s unusual equations: barbarian mind = subjective, uncultured; close to/one with nature = cultured mind.

In order to experience various aspects of nature one needs to do lots of travelling, preferably on foot. Here is a lovely rendition by Cid Corman of a passage from Basho’s Back Roads to Far Towns:

"Moon & sun are passing figures of countless generations, and years coming or going wanderers too. Drifting life away on a boat or meeting age leading a horse by the mouth, each day is a journey and the journey itself home. Amongst those of old were many that perished upon the journey."

‘The journey itself home’ — I love this line! And here is Basho’s own bamboo-themed haiku (trans. Lucien Stryck):

From moon wreathed

bamboo grove,

cuckoo song.

Basho was a dedicated scholar of the Japanese and Chinese literary classics. He was a follower of the Buddhist monk poet, Saigyo (1118-1190), another extensive traveller, whose waka praised the natural scenery and who happened to believe that all of nature is fully interdependent (sounds very pre-Darwinian). Saigyo’s love of nature was however at direct odds with the restraints of his Buddhist practices, which in turn served as a sort of point of departure in his poetry. Intoxicated by nature, Saigyo would let his verse assume some unexpected, if heretic, overtones. He searches and finds Buddha in the plants, wishing to die under a blossoming cherry tree — a sacrilegious thought; he dares a passionless monkhood, obsessed with the abandonment of desire and earthly attachments, to get ‘saddened’ by the sight of a single snipe flying up into the autumn evening. Saigyo the tireless traveller is constantly open to new experiences, is anxious to ‘go searching for blossoms in directions [he has] never been before’, and is profoundly saddened when a previously marked nature trail has completely disappeared:

In fifth-month rains

no trace of a path

where I can make my way

meadows of bamboo grass

awash in muddy water

It seems that among Japanese poets of early times a substantial number were lifelong travellers and nature lovers. Their art was a way of extrapolating truths out of the natural world. But fast forward a few centuries and we find modern poets starting to utilize natural phenomena as symbols and psychological metaphors. Heavily influenced by European nihilistic philosophies — you know, Dostoevsky, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche — Hagiwara Sakutaro (1886–1942) is credited as a major innovator and regarded as the pivotal figure of modern Japanese poetry. Not only did he daringly employ free verse and colloquialisms in his verse but he utilized these in a highly personal and evocative manner. Take the couple of poems, both entitled ‘Bamboo’ from Sakutaro’s first, and still the most popular collection Howling at the Moon (1917)

Bamboo

Something straight growing on the ground,

something sharp, blue, growing on the ground,

piercing the frozen winter,

in morning's empty path where its green leaves glisten,

shedding tears,

shedding the tears,

now repentance over, from above its shoulders,

blurred bamboo roots spreading,

something sharp, blue, growing on the ground.

Bamboo

On the gleaming ground bamboo growing,

blue bamboo growing,

under the ground bamboo roots growing,

roots gradually tapering off,

from root tips cilia growing,

faintly blurred cilia growing,

faintly trembling.

On the hard ground bamboo growing,

from the ground bamboo sharply growing,

straight, blind, bamboo growing,

at each frozen joint gallantly,

under the blue sky bamboo growing,

bamboo, bamboo, bamboo growing.

trans. Hiroaki Sato

These poems were placed as the second and third in the collection, building on the image from the first poem entitled ‘Sickly face at the bottom of the ground’, in which ‘a lonely invalid's face emerging/ […] time the winter solstice, from the lonely sickly ground / roots of thin blue bamboo beginning to grow’. What we have here is the essence of suffering itself, the physical and mental terror of the Confucian bamboo-man (see the earlier post Bamboonery 2).

Hagiwara’s bamboo poems, previously published in 1915, included the postscript ‘a poem of purgatory’ after the second poem. Not only that, but this poem carried the following two lines: ‘If I pray, if I pray, growing towards the sky / from the sinner’s shoulder bamboo growing’ — subsequently omitted from Howling at the Moon. So that’s where the ‘repentance over’ comes from! Apparently Hagiwara was a church frequenter and an ardent Bible reader at the time — the purgatory postscript stuck to five other poems in the collection. The fact that Christian concepts creep into his verse suggests one unique artist with an effervescent imagination and a knack for innovation, the ‘essential poet’ if you will. And when it came to the natural world, this was no mean feat as Hagiwara practically had centuries of deeply rooted poetic traditions to contend with.

In his insightful book ‘Principles of Poetry’ Hagiwara mulls over a question — an insulated Japan or a cosmopolitan Japan: ‘[…] If we want to choose the latter, we will have no choice but to carry on the lively spirit of the Meiji Reform and to stress more the vigorous poetical spirit — yearning for things non-existent and beyond reach’.

You can find more Hagiwara's poems here!

Bamboonery - Part 2

2011-06-13T22:27:00.000+09:00

Su Shi, often referred to as Su Dongpo (1037-1101), one of the major poets of the Song era, painted bamboo and wrote his poems in praise of the plant. Said Su Shi: 'I can go without meat in my meal, yet I can't live in a place without bamboo. No meat makes people slim, no bamboo makes people meretricious. Slim people can put on weight again, but meretriciousness cannot be rooted out.’

Bamboo has a profound meaning in Confucian, and therefore Chinese, iconography. Bamboo for the Chinese is much more than a plant. In fact, Confucianism teaches that human characteristics correspond with a bamboo. The plant’s straight stem is the symbol of moral strength, pliant yet unbreakable by the adverse winds. Its knot represents harmonious integration with others. The branches represent flexibility. The hollow inside of the bamboo stalk symbolizes the purged clarity of mind, or the absence of chaos, that is a prerequisite for a constructive thinking. The leaves symbolize subtlety and the poetic mind. Perhaps the earliest poem about bamboo, written during the Tang Dynasty by a government official Bai Juyi (772-846), encapsulates this spirit:

Planting Bamboos

trans. Arthur Waley

Unrewarded, my will to serve the State;
At my closed door autumn grasses grow.
What could I do to ease a rustic heart?
I planted bamboo, more than a hundred shoots.
When I see their beauty, as they grow by the stream-side,
I feel again as though I lived in the hills,
And many a time on public holidays
Round their railing I walk till night comes.
Do not say that their roots are still weak,
Do not say that their shade is still small;
Already I feel that both in garden and house
Day by day a fresher air moves.
But most I love, lying near the window-side,
to hear in their branches the sound of the autumn-wind.

Bamboo painting, on the other hand, requires the mastery and control of the brush strokes in order to balance the composition. The blank of the paper signifies yin while the brush strokes signify yang. Zheng Banqiao, a poet and a bamboo master in the Qing dynasty, wrote: ‘Love to tear the white paper window, with the bamboo shadows entering the meditation bed’, touching on the poetic idea of painting the bamboo shadows reflected upon the rice paper, usually seen on Chinese windows. In 1701 the ink bamboo painter Wen Tong wrote in The Book of Bamboo: ‘The first principle of bamboo composition is, the four parts of the plant should be considered in the following order: stem, knot, branches and leaves. If the basic rule is not followed, time and effort will be wasted and the picture will never be completed.’ It was apparently said of Wen Tong that there were whole bamboos in his heart.

Here is a detail of Su Shi’s own ink-on-paper painting depicting bamboo, chrysanthemum and Tai-hu rocks (http://vc.lib.harvard.edu/). Bamboo in itself is a complete subject because it carries lasting ethical values and it commands a truly talented painter to create varying tones that never repeat — the careful placement of dark/light tones, the execution of perfectly cylindrical internodes etc..

Su Dongpo not only painted bamboo but wrote numerous bamboo poems. I will introduce them beginning with a rather unique example, unique in that it shows how one bamboo metaphor, among many others, resulted in a political intrigue, and eventually in Su Shi’s demotion and exile. The following poem is critical of the government’s stiff reforms of the salt monopoly that made salt increasingly hard to find:

An old man of seventy, sickle at his waist,
Feels guilty the spring mountain bamboo
and bracken are sweet.
It's not that the music of Shao has made
him lose his sense of taste.
It's just that he's eaten his food for three
months without salt.

(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Su_Shi)

Notice the old man’s vicarious guilt, its transfer down the hierarchical ladder — from the bureaucrats as the real perpetrators, to the common folk as the actual victims. How Confucian was this? It somehow reminds me of the upending of the Communist ideals centuries later.

For his popular political poems Su Shi underwent numerous arrests, demotions, and spent twelve years of his life in exile. He was the main culprit of The Wutai Poem Case, a famous literary inquisition during the Song Dynasty rule. Here is Su Shi’s poem on the subject which shows that even in exile his satire hadn’t lost its sting.

On the Birth of His Son

trans. Arthur Waley

Families, when a child is born,
Want it to be intelligent.
I, through intelligence,
Having wrecked my whole life,
Only hope the baby will prove
Ignorant and stupid.
Then he will crown a tranquil life
By becoming a Cabinet Minister.

This sarcastic tone seems to be removed miles away from the Confucian formula and the ‘will to serve the state’.

Well, on a lighter note, here is a true anecdote that not only shows Su Shi in a domestic, relaxed atmosphere, but might even whet your appetites:

Huang Zhou was an agricultural heartland and as the price of pork in the area was cheap, it was a regular feature in the diet of Su Shi… One day, he was cooking pork with bamboo shoots when a friend dropped by. Switching the fire to gentle heat, he left the kitchen to play chess with the visitor. So engrossed was he with the game that he forgot the cooking. It was only at the end of the game he suddenly recalled the pork and bamboo stew and rushed to the kitchen. Expecting to find the pork burnt to crisp, he was surprised by the aroma when the lid of the pot was lifted. The edible pork had a rich red colour, tender crispy but not flaky with a glutinous texture without the greasy taste. The bamboo had soaked up excess fat. Together the pork and bamboo tasted terrific. Henceforth, it became a regular dish for himself and his guests who couldn't get enough of it. Marvelling at his creation, Su Shi composed an ode:

Huang Zhou produces excellent pork,
the price is cheap as dirt.
The rich despise it,
the poor can't cook it well.
Long on fire,
Short on water,
It will be delicious in its own time.
A bowl a day,
will satisfy a man enough to forget all cares.

(from Dale A. Johnson: ‘Bamboo Dreams’, found on dominicanoutreach.webs.com/treeprojects.htm).

Dongpo’s Pork was thus inadvertently created.

Apart from odes and political poems, Su Dongpo wrote numerous ‘tune poems’, or ‘Ci’, poetry originally written to fixed tunes, with strict tonal patterns and rhyme schemes. ‘Ci’ originated in the Tang Dynasty and was fully developed in the Song Dynasty. Here are extracts from two of Su Dongpo’s ‘Ci’, where bamboo plays a prominent role (trans. Yun Wang).

To the Tune of Ding Feng Bo [Calming the Wind and Waves]

Hear not sounds that pierce the woods beating the leaves
Why not chant a little sing and take it slow
Bamboo stick straw sandals lighter than riding a horse
Who is afraid?
A capeful of fog and rain all my life

To the Tune of He Xin Lang [To the Bridegroom]
Summer

A baby swallow flies into the splendid house
Quiet and no one around
The day retreats to shades of the wu-tong tree
I rise from a bath into the cool evening
My hands play with a round fan of white silk
The fan and the hand seem both jade
When I tire I recline
sleep alone my fresh sleep
Who pushes the painted door beyond the curtains?
Interrupting a dream of singing on terraces of jade
It is only the wind
knocking on bamboos

The unabbreviated poems here: http://www.nhn.ou.edu/~wang/wang_trans.html

The stone portrait of Su Shi, the original of which is kept in the Six-Banyan Pagoda in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province. Spot the inevitable bamboo stick.

Bamboonery - Part 1

2011-06-12T00:04:00.004+09:00

Last Sunday I joined a hiking group of about 30 odd people in Yawata town in the southern outskirts of Kyoto. After a couple of hours walking along the Kizu river, the biggest challenge still lay ahead — the climbing of the Otokoyama mountain through a wonderfully thick bamboo forest. Some half an hour later we reached Iwashimizu Hachimangu shrine, one of the three great Hachimangu shrines of Japan, in the olden times the rear Demon’s Gate of the capital Heian-kyo (literally “tranquillity and peace capital”), nowadays known as Kyoto. What was equally interesting, and certainly more surprising, was to find the shrine’s wooden tablet amulets called ema, usually reserved for kanji inscriptions or pictures of horses, bearing images of what unmistakably looked like a Western face of an older, bearded man. From some distance it looked like KFC’s colonel Sanders (didn’t know the monks liked chicken burgers), but it was instead revealed to be the face of none other than Thomas Alva Edison. Soon enough we came across a black-stone monolith dedicated to the memory of Edison. Thus awoken my curiosity demanded an explanation — no notices in English though.

Edison in fact used the bamboo from Mt. Otokoyama as a filament for the production of the first ever commercial incandescent light bulb! And so, Shinto religion being polytheist, their gods were more than happy to turn the great man into a deity because, as the shrine’s unofficial homepage attests, ‘he gave light to every people in the world’. After all, ‘electricity occupies the twilight zone between the world of spirit and the world of matter’, God himself being ‘the Great Electrician’ [Elbert Hubbard, Jovian society welcome address].

Edison was experimenting with a variety of materials in order to achieve a desired length of 600 hours which in his opinion would be long enough to justify its mass manufacturing. One day he picked up a bamboo fan, took a strand from it, carbonized it, and found that it burned for 200 hours, much longer than the bristol board filament he had been using thus far. Edison then sent out researchers around the world to find the bamboo of the highest burning quality. One of the delegates ended up in Japan and was told that the best bamboo could be found in Kyoto. It transpired that the electric bulb with the Yawate bamboo filament lasted for nearly 2500 hours, which persuaded Edison, and in turn J.P. Morgan, to heavily invest in the new company Edison General Electric in order to manufacture the electric light bulbs with the sticky, durable filaments made from the Yawata bamboo. This production went on for 10 years, until it was replaced by cellulose filament bulbs in 1894.

But the tale does not end here. Edison hoped that Japanese bamboo could be bettered and sent a team of explorers to South America, who after coming upon some great bamboo, became confused by the river systems and forgot where they had found it. Edison then sent a man named James Ricalton out to the jungles of Sri Lanka, Burma, Malaysia and India. Here are a few extracts from Ricalton’s own reminiscences of his meetings with Edison (www.jamesrwilson.com/family/ricaltonmeetsedison.html). Ricalton, a village schoolmaster, is summoned to appear before the great scientist apparently without being given any hints as to its purpose.

With a quizzical gleam in his eye, [Edison] said: `I want a man to ransack all the tropical jungles of the East to find a better fibre for my lamp; I expect it to be found in the palm or bamboo family. How would you like that job?' Suiting my reply to his love of brevity and dispatch, I said, `That would suit me.' `Can you go to-morrow?' was his next question.

No beating about the bush. It took Ricalton a few days to ‘learn his new trade’ of drawing and carbonizing fibres, after which he was promptly given further instructions by the wizard.

[…] Mr. Edison came to me one day and said: ‘If you will go up to the house’ (his palatial home not far away) ‘and look behind the sofa in the library you will find a joint of bamboo, a specimen of that found in South America; bring it down and make a study of it; if you find something equal to that I will be satisfied.’ At the home I was guided to the library by an Irish servant-woman, to whom I communicated my knowledge of the definite locality of the sample joint. She plunged her arm, bare and herculean, behind the aforementioned sofa, and holding aloft a section of wood, called out in a mood of discovery: ‘Is that it?’ Replying in the affirmative, she added, under an impulse of innocent divination that whatever her wizard master laid hands upon could result in nothing short of an invention, ‘Sure, sor, and what's he going to invint out o' that?’

After a 365-day long expedition Ricalton returned believing he had found the perfect bamboo in Ceylon. Alas, his efforts turned out to be in vain as Edison in the meantime had begun using artificial carbon as filament. It is rather refreshing, however, to find not a single trace of regret or disappointment in Ricalton’s reaction to the disheartening news. Indeed, he seems to feel thoroughly in debt to the scientist.

[…] during my connection with that mission I was at all times not less astonished at Mr. Edison's quick perception of conditions and his instant decision and his bigness of conceptions, than I had always been with his prodigious industry and his inventive genius.

Thinking persons know that blatant men never accomplish much, and Edison's marvellous brevity of speech along with his miraculous achievements should do much to put bores and garrulity out of fashion.

taken last summer in Arashiyama

Bamboo Facts:

* One out of every six people on earth lives in bamboo constructed homes.

* The fastest growing woody plant on this planet. It grows one third faster than the fastest growing tree. Some species can grow up to 1 meter per day. Size ranges from miniatures to towering columns of 60 meters.

* “I am not sure about how fast bamboo grows, but when I was in South America, we could hear it growing. We would walk past a patch and hear the creaking. Definitely a weird sound. The locals told me you could sometimes see it grow..” (MacLloyd from Arcadia, CA).

* A critical element in the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Bamboo is the fastest growing canopy for the re-greening of degraded areas and generates more oxygen than equivalent stand of trees.

* Bamboo provided the first re-greening in Hiroshima after the atomic blast in 1945.

* There are over 1000 species of bamboo on the earth.
* The technical name for a bamboo stem is a 'culm'.
* Most bamboos flower and produce seeds only after between 12 and 120 years growth...and then only once in a lifetime.

* An essential structural material in earthquake architecture. In Limon, Costa Rica, only the bamboo houses from the National Bamboo Project stood after their violent earthquake in 1992.

* The best gramophone needles were made of bamboo until the 1950s.

* A bridge over the Min River in China is 250 m long, 3 m wide, and built entirely of bamboo - no nails.

* A traditional kendo stick (‘shinai’) is made from dried bamboo.

source:

http://dominicanoutreach.webs.com/treeprojects.htm

http://www.qi.com/talk/viewtopic.php?p=1651
http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinai

L-plate

2011-06-05T01:07:00.003+09:00

As with most things civic and communal, Japanese have come up with a functional, albeit unnecessarily elaborate, pedantic and bureaucratic way of processing/renewing of driving licences. The system is in fact a curious version of Orwellian collectivism in the name of expediency. Yesterdays’ visit to the Kyoto Driving Licence Centre, which some smart planner dumped in the most inaccessible part of the city, proved indeed to be an Orwellian experience of sorts. Never have I felt less of a human and more of a ‘number’ whilst being prodded from one counter to the other, at each being peremptorily instructed what to do at the next by a busy clerk barely visible behind a low grille, all the time precariously carrying a bunch of papers about whose specific purpose I knew nothing about. In the course of a quarter of an hour I visited a dozen counters and even managed to have an eye-test and a photo-for-license taken. I was finally given a red-coloured tag numbered 26 and sent upstairs to what I had been dreading the most: a two-hour lecture as the final indoctrination into the ‘acceptance’ of the highway code rules. This is it, I thought, it’s my room 101. Except that it was ‘the red room’ — the tag turned out to be correspondent with a wooden seat of the same number (there were also a blue and a green lecture rooms, presumably for people with more/less traffic offences).

But the gods of roads and highways looked rather kindly upon me, thanks to my little plan and thanks to my ‘Julia’. We explained to the lecturer that I hardly understood a word of Japanese while Julia didn’t speak English well, or well enough, which would render the whole lecture pointless. He might have asked how on earth do you communicate then, in Chinese?!, but instead he came up with a half solution procuring a book of traffic rules in English (he twice reminded us it is only for ‘rental’) and sending us to the back benches of a half-empty classroom, where the air was much breezier than what looked like a controlled rigidity in the front rows. It was also a reversal of roles for me, from my everyday one of a classroom teacher to that of a student, a rather passive and disinterested one at that. The lecture itself proved to be much more instructive to Julia who really was just a trespasser and who, by the way, is currently a proud holder of ‘the golden’ license. This type of license carries no penalty points. And how could she earn any when she’s hardly driven since she got the license years ago. But the lecture was intended to instruct those of us who can actually drive, who have learned our lessons the hard way, on the actual streets and roads. Talk about role reversals. Talk about conversions and reconversions.

Anyway, this whole episode reminded me of a poem on driving I read only a couple of days ago (the word ‘coincidence’ carries less and less meaning as years go by) by Jamie McKendrick from his first collection ‘The Sirocco Room’, entitled Fetish, the fetish of course being the car. The speaker’s tone effortlessly blends the comical with the profound, and that for me is some achievement. Here is the beginning…

That my first car, at thirty, should be fifth-hand,

a filthy patchwork of worn azure and bare zinc

and amateur spray-jobs like a subway wall,

appeals to my pride as a failed consumer.

…the profoundness…

It takes me places that I thought I’d never see

even though seeing them is not that different

from not having seen them — but who’s to say

if experience doesn’t help, doing nothing does?

…and a lovely closure:

But what would happen if it left me?

I heard you say just now it’s dangerous

And drives you mad to fall in love at thirty.

At the moment I can only think of one other poem dealing with cars, and it is a ‘conversation’ with a driving instructor, by Michael Donaghy, entitled ‘L’. Again it’s an amusing piece with its own doses of insight and a ‘punchline’, which seems to be a prerequisite in the car-poems. Here is the poem in its entirety and I hope I am not infringing any copyrights as it was already published on the web here

‘Switch off the engine and secure the car.’

He slots his pen across his clipboard

and makes a little cathedral of his fingers

as though I were helping him with his enquiries.

‘Tell me, Michael, what's your line of work?’

I tell him the truth. Why not? I've failed anyway.

‘Driving and writing have a lot in common,’

he parleys, and we sit there, the two of us

blinking into the average braking distance

for 30 mph, wondering what he means.

I want to help but it's his turn to talk.

When my turn comes he'll probably look at me

instead of his hand, stalled now in mid-gesture

like a milkfloat halfway across a junction.

Look at him. What if I'd said butcher?

At last ‘It's all a matter of giving – proper – signals’

is the best he can do. But then he astonishes me.

‘I'm going to approve your licence,

but I don't care much for your … ‘ Quick glance.

‘interpretation of the Highway Code.’

Once I told Michael how I really liked this poem, to which he rather cryptically responded by saying something like ‘I am glad you liked it’ with the emphasis on ‘you’ which I took to imply he was maybe surprised that a rather serious figure I must have cut 15 odd years ago would enjoy this humorous oddity. But you were seldom 100% sure with Mike.

Readers, do let me know if there is a driving/car poem that you know of, or perhaps have written yourself. Cheers.

Let's All Slow Down a Bit

2011-05-25T23:47:00.006+09:00

Ever felt like abandoning, yes abandoning, your pointless stressful little jobs, bidding ‘goodbye to all that’, and shooting off to the white mountains, or getting yourself one of them canal boats, or perhaps settling down on a remote island, and spending the rest of your days dangerously close to nature, fighting the elements, the procrastination, the ennui? Thoughts like these are far from illegitimate for your average middle-aged gaijin teacher in Japan. As a friend of mine recently put it, ‘I've turned into a gaijin gypsy roaming from campus to campus with piles of paper and books no one is interested in’. A recent, and what seemed at first a surprising, departure of another friend to South America, coupled with my own visit to Okinawa few weeks ago, prompted me to seriously reconsider own current state of affairs. It’s not that I am in deep shit or any particular predicament at the moment. It’s all to do with ‘mid-life’ existential crisis and the usual thoughts and moods that accompany it — come to think of it I’ve always been attracted to all things existential, particularly in my formative years.

There is a Swedish proverb: ‘Those who wish to sing, always find a song’. I take this to stand as a broader metaphor, applicable to songs of various operative moods — ‘existentialist’ in this case. Well I ran into this short docu-video on the Guardian online last month, which introduced us to one Ante Vukušić, a meteorologist who has lived and worked on the mount Velebit, Croatia, for the past 37 years. In the 5-minute video we get a glimpse of this fascinating mountain range of extreme weather patterns, of the astonishing richness of wildlife (there are, for instance, over 2000 plant species — the whole of UK has 1180!), a place where you can meet a bear, a wolf, a lynx, a fox or a marten, a place where you could be snowbound for weeks on end, a mountain range where each peak has a unique view. And so, for the purely existential reasons this largely ignored clip (so far only about 70 hits on youtube) made quite an impression on me, even to the point of finding myself writing an inspired poem. Then an unexpected association crossed my mind, as I somehow remembered Auggie Wren, a character from the movie Smoke (1995), played by Harvey Keitel. The movie has to be one of my all-time favourites. Anyway, for me the link between the two men was instantly obvious and rather fascinating (despite Ante’s ‘I can’t grasp the idea of living in a city’), and so I challenge you to find it, and let me know the results — post a comment/email. First, here is the Velebit national park clip:

And here is that amazing photo album scene with Keitel and William Hurt, as the latter is perusing Keitel’s ‘life’s work’ with Auggie’s precious ‘you’ll never get it if you don’t slow down my friend’.

Germans in Okinawa / How Thick Was Berlin Wall

2011-05-14T10:42:00.005+09:00

Most people have heard of Okinawa, yet not many living outside of Japan would have heard of the Okinawan island of Miyakojima, located much closer to Taiwan than to mainland Japan. Even fewer people would be aware of an apparent ‘special relationship’ between Miyakojima and Germany. That’s right, Deutschland. Now, you would think Miyakojima and Germany do not have much in common. And you’ll be right, they don’t. Except that on the island there is to be found a longish road named after German Chancellor Schröder who visited there in 2000. The road stretches for miles, from the attractive airport all the way down to the Ueno German Culture Village, which is dedicated to the friendship between the two countries. The village boasts the original-sized Marksburg castle replica, the XIX c. German villa and a number of German traditional artefacts. The staff, among them the castle reception lady, look overeager to put their rusty German into practice at every opportunity (‘Du bist Deutschland?'). Pity my German’s even rustier. Slightly disappointed, she still seems delighted to meet a ‘European’.

As far as replicas go the Marksburg one in Miyakojima strives to emulate the original in as much detail as possible — including the major interior rooms like the Rittersaal, the painted Chapel Tower, and the Kemenate (bed-chamber). The castle also seems to have succeeded in preserving the mediaeval chilliness of the place — the original Marksburg’s Kemenate, for instance, was one of the few rooms to be heated with a stove — despite the fact that the outside temperature on the day was in the high twenties. I particularly liked the irregular, acute-angled, claustrophobic spaces between the inner walls of the castle and the keep, which instantly reminded me of Wiene’s Dr. Caligari expressionistic sets.

So, what’s the Germany-themed park doing on this tiny Pacific island? The story goes back to July 11, 1873, when a German merchant ship R.J.Robertson wrecked after being hit by typhoon and smashing against a large coral reef. The Ueno islanders rescued all of the eight stranded crewmembers and gave them shelter and food for 37 days, until the sailors were fit for the return to China and finally back to Germany. Having learnt of the incident, the German Emperor sent a memorial and gifts of appreciation to the Okinawan island. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

At the village one cannot help but march from one building to another to the tune of the Bavarian brass band coming from the PA system. One of these building is the strange ‘Children’s House’. It hosts an odd mix of children’s toys and books, on one hand, and two slabs of the original Berlin Wall and a photographic retrospective of the divided Germany, on the other. No concept to speak of. Nevertheless it was the opportunity for what I like to call the third-hand photography: the taking of a photo of a photo of a photo. Still, some haven't lost much of their emotional potency.

The last photo goes nicely with Matthew Sweeney’s poem ‘Breaches’ from his ‘Cacti’ collection — one of the few poems in English on the demolition of the Berlin Wall written first-hand. The poem starts:

Glühwein with honey at Potsdamer Platz,

at the breach that drew the biggest cheer

when the pastel-coloured Trabis drove through.

Slush underfoot, wrecking shoes.

In the darkening distance: the Reichstag.

The middle section of the poem gives some first-person reportage-like descriptions of the wrecking activities, and ends with the equally matter-of-fact

We took our tiny hammer and whacked chips

from that graffiti-daubed, astoundingly thin,

infamous construction, helping in our way

to make it disappear.

The historical symbolism of the places mentioned — the Wall, the Reichstag, Potsdamer Platz — would weigh heavy in any poem, and Sweeney’s documentary/picture-postcard voice gives his a releasing counterweight.

Other British poets have written on the subject. Bloodaxe called Ken Smith’s poem The Wall ‘the quintessential English poem on the Berlin Wall’ — due to potential copyright infringements I am not going to publish it, but here is the Facebook link for you poetry nuts: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=175423809210

On the same post you will find a link to the New York Times page containing 9 poems on the Berlin Wall commissioned by the paper on the 20^th anniversary of the fall (where you can download all 9 poems as a single jpeg). The poets commissioned hail from US, Poland, Yugoslavia (Slovenia), Germany and Russia. Bloodaxe wonders why on earth there were no British poets included. Well, there were no Canadians, Icelanders, Mexicans, South Africans, Irish either. Being born in Yugoslavia myself, it’s only fitting that I should post a poem by a then-Yugoslav writer Tomaž Šalamun. I like the poem’s seemingly disinterested, laconic voice, and the way it works as a curious hodgepodge: bumblebees, a resurrected Artaud, Ron Padgett, the Pergamon Museum, the Great Depression, all laid out as evocative couplets like twinned remnants of an ancient wall. Click on the image to view the poem large.

It is funny, astonishing even, that the Wall is described by Šalamun as being ‘thick’ whereas Sweeney calls it ‘astoundingly thin’. Even if one took these descriptions metaphorically — ‘thickness’ may hint at the magnitude of separation, ‘thinness’ at the poet’s realization that the apparent thickness was in fact very fragile, or that Sweeney the poet had expected the wall to be much thicker — this poetic discrepancy calls for factual clarification. Having recently seen two original slabs in Okinawa, I recall that the thickness/thinness was no more than 20cm. Well, just to make sure I’ve consulted a few internet sources. Although there were variations in the construction, the final scores amount to this: the Wall was 4.1 m/13.5 ft high, 16 cm/7 in thick, 155 km/96 mi long. Made of concrete slabs. End of story.

To All of You Workers...

2011-05-02T01:09:00.003+09:00

HAPPY MAY DAY!

In the age of financial/industrial conglomerates it seems the Workers of the world, Unite! slogan has never been more relevant. And yet Unions have never been weaker (correct me if I am wrong), Capitalism is winning even in China and Russia. The bastions of Communism, North Korea and Cuba, have pushed ideology to the edge of self-grandiose insanity. Kyoto city itself used to be a traditional stronghold of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), up until about mid-nineties when a major change in the voting system (multi-member districts became single-member districts), made it much harder for the JCP candidates to get elected. Still, in the city council election of April 2007 the JCP took 19 seats, only 4 less than the ruling LDP.

Anyway, Horikawa-dori around 11a.m. today was a sight to behold, so surprising in fact that, still somewhat shocked, I sat down and wrote this poem few hours later.

Different City

For a moment it feels a different city:

red banners, loudspeakers, chants,

the traffic at a standstill.

Then we remember it is Kyoto –

the flow is a two-row column

bracketed by colours, kanji

and union-logos, duly stopping

at red lights. I ask my son,

who is eight, what the fuss is about.

Hmm…Maybe they want money.

Unable to pass through

we make a pushbike detour

ending up at a local shrine

where two tiddly daughters

are throwing bits of bread

to the always hungry carp;

nearby a group of workers sit

on holy slabs, drink beer.

It’s a blessed Sunday after all.

Later I’m at a local grocery.

The mobile rings. It’s Luke,

confirming it’s the wages…

the higher wages they want.

The shop is empty. There are three

check-out girls standing by

the cash-registers, standing

and smiling. They probably want

to be out there with the crowds today.

I pay in cash, wishing for once

the onigiri weren’t a bargain.

May 1^st, 2011

'Bandiera Rossa' turned raw punk-rock, courtesy of the Slovenian band 'Pankrti' from 1983. Celebrate the Labour Day, hopefully by thrashing your head about in existential despair.

Klee Rules

2011-04-27T22:52:00.003+09:00

Seeing Paul Klee’s paintings first hand is a great experience. The current exhibition at MOMAK (National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto) entitled ‘Klee: Art in the Making’, has been beckoning for weeks. I finally made it this past Sunday, at first having to wait for a hailstorm to clear off – it rained for the best part of the afternoon.

There is so much music and rhythm in Paul’s work. The paintings are beautiful in their duality: on the one hand intuitive, poetic, spiritual; on the other organized, orderly, architectural. Someone described Klee’s drawings in Pedagogical Sketchbook as ‘creative arithmetic’ — nicely summed up. The MOMAK exhibition, as the title suggests, sheds light on the actual process and methods Klee used to produce his art. The methods were paramount to him: from 1911 onwards, Klee kept an ongoing list of his works as each entry included, beside a title, a detailed description of the techniques used. In this Klee was a fanatic: the earliest entry relates to the work from 1883, when he was only four years old. Klee documented this "working process" with photographs of his atelier in various periods (spot Klee in his Bern studio, 1926), and even marked certain paintings as "Sonderklasse (Special Class)", ‘keeping these works at hand to use as models to reflect on’. Klee’s techniques were varied, and the exhibition outlines them into four distinct parts, evidently following Klee’s own categorizations:

Process 1: “Ölpause — Oilpause” (sketches colourized, only slightly modified)

Process 2: “Zerschnitten/Neukombiniert — Cut/Reassemble”

Process 3: “Teilstücke — Parts” (“non-symmetrical balance”)

Process 4: “Recto/Verso — Two-sided Sheet” (IR scans reveal the underlying images, which seem to have little to do with the painting itself, apart from a possible thematic inspiration — one such very spare painting has a background drawing of what looks a heavily tattooed Hell’s Angel-type fella with a mean-looking mutt on the leash! How progressive is that!)

The above methods are not unlike how a modern poet, especially one equipped with a word-processor, might compose verse. I recall an interview with the poet Hugo Williams in the ‘Horizon Review’, in which he was asked about the materials he uses to write with — here is Hugo’s answer:

A pen, which never leaves the house; a beautiful Parker. After that I type it out, then handwrite it, and it goes back and forth from typing to writing until I’m happy with it. One thing I do sometimes is type out individual units, bits that stick together. Very often I find though that I don’t know what order things are in, so I have to find that out by getting a beginning and an end. Then, to find the middle bits, I make strips of paper with the text and move them around on a desk. I suppose that’s what people do with computers but I just do it on the desk.

[http://www.saltpublishing.com/horizon/issues/03/text/brown_phil.htm]

Another important work from the MOMAK exhibition is Klee’s Tightrope Walker (1923). The whole drawing is hovering, like its protagonist, between the tragic and the comic. The work has been commonly interpreted as a metaphor for a precarious existence of a modern man, yet Klee used this particular piece for an even more important end: to demonstrate his dynamic concept of space and perception. In the aforementioned Pedagogical Sketchbook Klee’s tightrope walker with a bamboo stick is ‘emphatically concerned about his balance. He calculates the Gravity on both ends. He is the scale’ (p. 42). As he walks the balance is alternately disturbed and restored, left to right, right to left. Klee uses this elegant metaphor to allude to the subjectivity of human perception. As Sibyl Moholy-Nagy explains in her introduction: ‘Man, precariously balanced on two unstable legs, uses optical illusion as a safety device. Horizon as concrete fact, and horizon as an imaginary safety belt that has to be believed in…’ (p.10). Indeed, Klee shows us another example:

asking if the representation of the house wall is incorrect. He concludes that it is not incorrect logically (as the lower windows are larger perspectively since they are closer to the eye), but are incorrect phychologically, because ‘every creature, in order to preserve his balance, insists on seeing actual verticals projected as such’ (p.41). Klee’s idea of balance is non-symmetrical though. It is achieved through the ‘equalization of unequal but equivalent parts’. Here is Klee’s illustration:

As Moholy-Nagy puts it: ‘The purely material balance of the scale finds its counter-part in the purely psychological balance of light and dark, weightless and heavy colours’ (p.10). Klee thus challenges our conventional perception, ushering us into the world of metaphysical and spiritual — his invitation to approach art intuitively. This ‘transition from observation to intuition’ defines, as Moholy-Nagy suggests, Klee’s deepest axiomatic wisdom: TO STAND DESPITE ALL POSSIBILITIES TO FALL! Sounds cool. I should hang this up above my writing desk.

Klee’s concepts and speculations are no less fascinating than his paintings. Having so far only scratched the surface, I will keep probing and investigating. Expect further musings on Paul Klee. To wrap this entry up, here is a 4 minute video of Klee’s few paintings as they drift in and out of a low-key jazzy tune. The beauty of juxtaposition.

April 27, 2011

Pilgrims, Ghosts, Suicides

2011-04-20T22:07:00.006+09:00

In Kamakura (1920)

In Kamakura, near the great Daibutsu,
When I had sat a long time on the ground
And been gathered up, forgetful of my face and form,
Into the face and form of endless dream,
I found among the booths a little pendant Buddha
With the steel of a round mirror for His halo . . .
So that a brooding head still intervenes in bronze
Between my face and the image of my face,
And I cannot see myself and not see Him.

This poem, which so lovingly captures what looks like a moment of approaching a religious ecstasy, was penned by Witter Bynner, US poet (1881-1968). Bynner and Harvard friend Arthur Davison Ficke (1883–1945), were the last American poets of note to visit Japan from 1917 until after the Second World War. Which leads us to Lafcadio Hearn (see my earlier post ‘Kiri sute gomen’) for Bynner was among the earliest pilgrims to Hearn’s house in Matsue (thousands have followed). Here is the poem which recounts this particular visit:

In the House of Lafcadio Hearn (1917)

I left my name today
Before him and Buddha,
And knelt among his books,
And had tea with his wife and two children
And bowed low to them . . .
And then in his garden,
When his wife picked for me the petals I wished,
His son said,
“But he liked the maple best,”
And brought me a spray of young leaves.

Compare this rather conventional poem to Bynner’s prose relation of the same visit, in his letter of May 1917 to Haniel Long:

A Japanese house. A barefoot boy of nineteen with three or four strong hairs on his chin and strong goggles on his eyes. The Hearn nose. Otherwise, Japanese. Shy, shining, abrupt manners. Little English—none at first. His mother, out but sent for. I was led past two or three simple purely Japanese rooms, then stockinged my way across the oil-cloth floor of a small room with a few pieces of European furniture, table and chairs, into a study lined with bookcases but otherwise Japanese. My card was laid before Hearn’s picture in the little Buddhist shrine. Mother came. No English. Little sister. Next to no eyes. Bows. Smiles. Tea. I seemed to be the first pilgrim. They didn’t even know that the house was mentioned in the guidebook. Their name is Koizumi. They were pleased. I asked for a blossom from the garden. She gave it to me. But Kazuo Koizumi crossed and brought me a spray of little leaves, saying, “Father liked best the maples.” And of that I made a poem.

Sometimes prose can be more ‘poetic’ than poetry. More affecting, more vivid, in this instance.

Let’s turn to the man himself, Lafcadio Hearn, about whom I’ve been meaning to write for more than a month now. My apologies to folks out there expecting the report from Meiji Mura, where I did visit in early March, two days before the tsunami hit Japan in fact. The Meiji village is an open air museum, and is a period building visitor’s delight: 67 historical edifices from the Meiji, Taisho and early Showa periods. Each building – and we are talking major architecture here – would be at first dismantled, then moved over from its original location to the village (situated in Gifu prefecture), where it would be finally reconstructed – brick by brick, plank by plank, nail by nail – to its original glory. Since 1965 various buildings have been strategically dotted over the 250 acres of rolling hills, overlooking the lake Iruka.

Surrounded by churches, hotels, theatres, opulent residences, Hearn’s summer house looked hardly imposing. That I didn’t mind. Yet, disappointing that the upper floor, where Hearn would stay while visiting a fishmonger Yamaguchi-san (‘the most amiable Japanese [Hearn] had ever known’), was off-limits. Instead, various house objects have been moved to the ground level and squeezed inside this tiny room. I rather liked those amateurish drawings, possibly done by Hearn, hanging from the ceiling giving the whole room a casual, life-like atmosphere (someone, remove those damn tablets!).

Lafcadio is largely renowned for his ghost stories, the most famous collection being Kwaidan (stories were later used as the basis for Masaki Kobayashi’s eponymous, wonderfully expressionistic film from 1965). Hearn’s interest, even infatuation, with the supernatural and the macabre dates back to his Cincinnati days of 1870s (and quite possibly earlier), the period when he became known for his florid journalistic accounts of local murders, and his interest in the city’s disadvantaged. When the latter interest erupted into a love affair, Hearn went as far as marrying a black woman, an illegal act at the time (they divorced in 1877).

No wonder Lafcadio felt at home in Japan, the country’s folklore teeming with all kinds of monsters, elves and ghost legends. On the other hand, it is difficult not to conclude that it was his professional inquisitiveness, and most of all open-mindedness, which enabled Hearn to delve so deep into the psyche of the nation so alien and mysterious. At the same time he was very much aware, probably with a tinge of sadness, that the bridge between the Eastern and Western worlds would forever rest on shaky foundations for there could never be a complete understanding of each other:

Sympathy is limited by comprehension. We may sympathize to the
same degree that we understand. One may imagine that he
sympathizes with a Japanese or a Chinese; but the sympathy can
never be real to more than a small extent outside of the simplest
phases of common emotional life,--those phases in which child and
man are at one. The more complex feelings of the Oriental have
been composed by combinations of experiences, ancestral and
individual, which have had no really precise correspondence in
Western life, and which we can therefore not fully know. For
converse reasons, the Japanese cannot, even though they would,
give Europeans their best sympathy.

from ‘Kokoro’, part II: ‘The Genius of Japanese Civilization’, 1895 [http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8882]

Hearn’s intuitive, serpent-tongue-like inquisitiveness leads him to question the creeds of the Western thought once confronted with the doctrines and views of Buddhist teaching. To borrow a phrase from today's Guardian article (on Chris Hitchens), Hearn's open-minded curiosity is akin to a 'child's eager apprehension of what feels just and true'. Consider the following passage in which Lafcadio consults his learned friend about the case of a certain young priest from Osaka, who committed suicide as he found it impossible to reconcile his powerful worldly attraction to a woman with the equally powerful religious calling.

I called upon a Japanese friend, a Buddhist scholar, to ask some

questions about the religious aspects of the incident. Even as a

confession of human weakness, that suicide appeared to me a

heroism.

It did not so appear to my friend. He spoke words of rebuke. He

reminded me that one who even suggested suicide as a means of

escape from sin had been pronounced by the Buddha a spiritual

outcast,--unfit to live with holy men. As for the dead priest, he

had been one of those whom the Teacher called fools. Only a fool

could imagine that by destroying his own body he was destroying

also within himself the sources of sin.

"But," I protested, "this man's life was pure.... Suppose he

sought death that he might not, unwittingly, cause others to

commit sin?"

My friend smiled ironically. Then he said:--"There was once a

lady of Japan, nobly torn and very beautiful, who wanted to

become a nun. She went to a certain temple, and made her wish

known. But the high-priest said to her, 'You are still very

young. You have lived the life of courts. To the eyes of worldly

men you are beautiful; and, because of your face, temptations to

return to the pleasures of the world will be devised for you.

Also this wish of yours may be due to some momentary sorrow.

Therefore, I cannot now consent to your request.' But she still

pleaded so earnestly, that he deemed it best to leave her

abruptly. There was a large hibachi--a brazier of glowing

charcoal--in the room where she found herself alone. She heated

the iron tongs of the brazier till they were red, and with them

horribly pierced and seamed her face, destroying her beauty

forever. Then the priest, alarmed by the smell of the burning,

returned in haste, and was very much grieved by what he saw. But

she pleaded again, without any trembling in her voice: 'Because I

was beautiful, you refused to take me. Will you take me now?' She

was accepted into the Order, and became a holy nun.... Well,

which was the wiser, that woman, or the priest you wanted to

praise?"

"But was it the duty of the priest," I asked, "to disfigure his

face?"

"Certainly not! Even the woman's action would have been very

unworthy if done only as a protection against temptation. Self-

mutilation of any sort is forbidden by the law of Buddha; and

she transgressed. But, as she burned her face only that she might

be able to enter at once upon the Path, and not because afraid of

being unable by her own will to resist sin, her fault was a minor

fault. On the other hand, the priest who took his own life

committed a very great offense. He should have tried to convert

those who tempted him. This he was too weak to do. If he felt it

impossible to keep from sinning as a priest, then it would have

been better for him to return to the world, and there try to

follow the law for such as do not belong to the Order."

"According to Buddhism, therefore, he has obtained no merit?" I

queried.

"It is not easy to imagine that he has. Only by those ignorant of

the Law can his action be commended."

"And by those knowing the Law, what will be thought of the

results, the karma of his act?"

My friend mused a little; then he said, thoughtfully:--"The whole

truth of that suicide we cannot fully know. Perhaps it was not

the first time."

"Do you mean that in some former life also he may have tried to

escape from sin by destroying his own body?"

"Yes. Or in many former lives."

"What of his future lives?"

"Only a Buddha could answer that with certain knowledge."

"But what is the teaching?"

"You forget that it is not possible for us to know what was in

the mind of that man."

"Suppose that he sought death only to escape from sinning?"

"Then he will have to face the like temptation again and again,

and all the sorrow of it, and all the pain, even for a thousand

times a thousand times, until he shall have learned to master

himself. There is no escape through death from the supreme

necessity of self-conquest."

After parting with my friend, his words continued to haunt me;

and they haunt me still. They forced new thoughts about some

theories hazarded in the first part of this paper. I have not yet

been able to assure myself that his weird interpretation of the

amatory mystery is any less worthy of consideration than our

Western interpretations. I have been wondering whether the loves

that lead to death might not mean much more than the ghostly

hunger of buried passions. Might they not signify also the

inevitable penalty of long-forgotten sins?

from ‘Kokoro’, part IX: ‘By Force of Karma’, 1895

[http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8882]

Here is a one-minute Lafcadio Hearn intro video, including an outside view of his summering house at Meiji Mura:

The Sakura Vexations

2011-04-08T18:03:00.007+09:00

It is the season of cherry blossoms. It is also the season of by-elections. And this year in particular it is the period of post-tsunami aftershocks, both literal and mental. The period of rebuilding the humbled towns and villages, of re-solidifying the country’s collective as well as many personal identities. Many have predicted it will take years. Some say the ‘new identity’ is bound to emerge: more honest, straightforward, transparent, less evasive, less self-interested. Maybe these are the new platforms on which the local politicians plan to pick up votes. Who knows. The only thing we are able to hear from the blaring speakers mounted on top of the canvassing vans, which incessantly cruise the cities and towns nationwide, are the usual slogans and the ubiquitous repetitions of the candidates’ names, morning day and night: Matsuda san! Matsuda san! Vote Matsuda! Thank you very much for your attention! Thank you so very much! Matsuda san! Matsuda… followed by a touch of Japanese irony: We are truly sorry to make so much noise! We sincerely apologize… Matsuda san! Vote Matsuda! — and so on, making you wish Matsuda-san suddenly materialized so you can punch him straight in the face.

The Happy Hopefuls

The public spaces where sakura are blooming are turning from places of wonder to tiny battlefields, where people are pushing, shoving and elbowing each other for that ‘perfect-angle’ digital snap. What’s even more surprising is that the usual ‘sumimasen’ and ‘gomenasai’ (pardon, excuse me), the hallmark expressions of Japanese politeness and awareness, are largely absent in these instances. Such is the commotion and hurry as if the blossoms would vanish the very next minute. As if people are so drawn in by the call of the annual exercise, they suddenly start regarding their fellow man as no more than a physical obstacle jeopardising a certain photographic mission. Insane. Yes, the beautiful sakura trees are very much about, but the access to them is perilously linked with the crowds and the potential annoyance they bring. To find a solitary cherry tree in a pristine, natural environment is truly a rarity these days. Unless you are lucky to live in the country, or perform a monk’s duty at a remote Zen temple. There, perhaps, one could truly become awestruck and consequently pen a haiku or two.

The following images were taken three days ago around Shijo-Kamogawa in central Kyoto (obstacles notwithstanding). Click to enlarge

April 08, 2011

Mirrors

2011-04-05T00:24:00.011+09:00

House of Mirrors

Tall and thin or short and fat
On the fairgrounds where it’s at
House of Mirrors is the name
Don’t you miss it be a shame
Silly shapes believe it’s true
Mirrors make a fool of you.

by Geoffrey Schmitt

My first ever visit to the house of mirrors the other day at the Kobe amusement park, reminded me of couple of great flicks in which mirror labyrinths play a big role. They are, of course, ‘The Lady from Shanghai’ (1948), dir. Orson Welles, and ‘Enter the Dragon’ ('73), a classic Bruce Lee feature. Orson's masterpiece was originally intended to run over two hours (presumably bringing much in-depth dialogue and characterization to it). That the Hollywood big shots are very good at butchering wonderful scripts in pursuit of financial profit is no news, as the following extract attests:

The early script of The Lady from Shanghai is dated August 17, 1946, when the film was still titled Take This Woman. At that point, Welles was still basing all the action for the film in New York City and on nearby Long Island, which were the same settings used in the novel by Sherwood King, entitled If I Die Before I Wake.

For anyone who knows the work of Orson Welles, this first draft also includes many wonderful references, such as this passage that begins on page 15, where Michael O’ Hara and the “notorious” Mrs.Bannister discuss Don Quixote, which naturally, was completely cut out of the film when it was finally released (at 87 minutes), by Columbia in 1948:

CLOSE TWO SHOT – MICHAEL AND THE GIRL

THE GIRL There’s a police car —

MICHAEL We’re just comin’ out of the park, the horse and cart’ll make it too simple for the cops to be findin’ us —

He pulls up to a lamp-post.

MEDIUM SHOT – THE CARRIAGE
Michael gets out of the carriage and hitches the horse to the lamp.

THE GIRL You don’t care for them very much, do you, Michael?

MICHAELThe cops? (somberly) Faith, they can struggle along without our doin’ their work for ‘em.

He helps the girl down out of the carriage, then bows to the horse.

MICHAEL (continuing) Farewell, Rosinante.

THE GIRL That sounds like my name. (smiles)

He takes her arm.

TRUCKING SHOT — MICHAEL AND THE GIRL
They start walking.

MICHAEL Sure, Rosinante’s a horse in a book. You’re Rosaleen.

THE GIRL Who’s she?

MICHAEL A girl in a book.

THE GIRL I remember — Rosinante was the old nag Don Quixote rode when he went out after those windmills. I think you’re a lot like Don Quixote, yourself Michael. You haven’t heard about the age of chivalry. It’s out of business.

MICHAEL The tough boys that went after you in the park — they didn’t look like windmills to me —

THE GIRL They weren’t. I’m sorry, Michael, I guess you’re really what you think you are.

MICHAEL Whatever’s that now?

THE GIRL A knight errant — a real live knight errant. When you were a boy, you read all about them, didn’t you, Michael? And you never got over it.

MICHAEL (with a quizzical grin) You mean I never grew up? And what, can you tell me, does a knight errant do for his livelihood?

THE GIRL Oh, he doesn’t bother much about earning a living. He spends most of this time rescuing maidens in distress. He always slays the dragon and saves the princess, and he makes the prettiest speeches. But you’d better be careful. Things have changed, Sir Knight. Nowadays it’s usually the dragon that lives happily ever after.

MICHAEL Don’t the princess and the knight ever make it?

THE GIRL Sometimes she gives him a kiss.

Michael just looks at her, terribly embarrassed. A funny little spark comes into her eye.

THE GIRL (continuing) Michael… You know what’s wrong with being a knight errant?

MICHAEL No.

THE GIRL He’s brave and bold because his heart is pure. But he’s an awful fool — He doesn’t know anything about women.

She takes his hand and leads him to the street corner.

THE GIRL (continuing) If I hadn’t seen the way you can fight, I’d say you spend all your time reading.

MICHAEL A sailor has nothin’ but time, Faith. So must a girl ridin’ all by herself in a carriage in the lonesome dark. You must have time, and to spare.

THE GIRL (quietly) No, I haven’t much time… (after a minute — she’s been thinking) You don’t like the police, Michael. Is there some reason why they don’t like you?

MICHAEL (darkly) They’ve never put me in jail — in American.

By now they have stopped at the street corner.

THE GIRL My car’s a block down that way…

MICHAEL The nicest jails are in Australia. The worst are in Spain.

THE GIRL You must be a naughty boy, Michael.

MICHAEL I’m careless.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

source: http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=858

The movie has to have one of the best-matched opening and closing lines ever:

START:

When I start out to make a fool of myself...
...there´s very little can stop me.

END:

Well, everybody is somebody´s fool.
The only way to stay out of trouble is to grow old.
So I guess l´ll concentrate on that.
Maybe l´ll live so long...that l´ll forget her.
Maybe l´ll die trying.

Here are the 'highlights' of the film, featuring of course the Shanghai Ladyship herself (Rita Hayworth), amidst those fateful mirrors.

The music is provided by The Black Keys song 'Ten Cent Pistol', made more than 60 years after the movie and yet it blends well with the post-war noir atmosphere. These lyrics in particular:

There's nothing worse
In this world
Than payback from a
Jealous girl

The laws of man
Don't apply
When blood gets in
A woman's eye

Well, she hit them with her ten cent pistol
Because they ruined her name
Well, she hit them with her ten cent pistol
And they've never been the same

April 05, 2011

On Awaji Island

2011-04-04T01:07:00.012+09:00

Climbing the Mount Mikuma to Sumoto Castle and Back

by a designated footpath reserved for the slightly adventurous — if the adventurous means wearing Columbia shoes, nibbling the potato chips, pausing to catch breath between bites and swallowed up syllables, if the adventurous means gesturing there’s a songbird in the bushes, as it crosses the path at a safe distance and hops off out of sight leaving us to notice how the earth layers (the strips of land having been shaved off by bulldozers) have exposed the roots and crust ducts to the naked eye, the eye that leads us up to the cryptic white blotches on several tree barks – the birth of fungi?

On the hilltop, you take a snap surreptitiously: my shaved head from the back as the panorama foreground. Your ocular cunning surprises.

The castle grounds unpeopled. A tea room, its one door open, dark inside. A woman dozed off with her back turned, panda-like. The fried octopus rolls are advertised, not to be seen or sniffed.

The castle fenced-off by the restoration work signs. Curiosity gets the better of me as I hurdle over the metal bars — anticipating your law-abiding, scolding look — and climb up the wooden staircase for a glimpse of the castle’s interior: the paint peeling off the walls, the window bars rusty black; the whole place abandoned to its natural decay. I take the opportunity to imagine my nail-scratching the black bars down to their bloodstained bones.

On the way down the path feels much steeper. A polite nod to a man walking uphill. Knees hurting. My near-calamitous fall. More nods to more unnamed birds. Your birdlike chirping.

At the foot of the hill you point to the public toilet. It takes me a few seconds to recall I wanted to pee back up the path. We stroll along the beach fancying the sand belongs to us. In the distance children’s excited voices: 'Unagi! Unagi!' I pick up a ball of sand the size of a marble, about to pocket it, as a souvenir. 'Leave it' – you say – 'it wants to become a grain.'

April 02, 2011

Is It Ethical to Suffer?

2011-03-31T12:29:00.005+09:00

The images of the Japanese calamity are overwhelming not only by revealing the vast physical damage but also by reminding us once again that humans are mere toys in the hands of mother nature. ‘Like toys’ was the often repeated phrase on people’s lips, here in Kyoto and probably elsewhere, as we watched cars, ships, houses being tossed about like children crash theirs in anger or boredom. The tectonic plates were either bored or very angry indeed on March 11^th. People spared by the wrathful tremors stood silently in awe and disbelief. On television, it was as if we were watching a high-budget disaster movie from the comfort of our armchairs, largely unable to find a suitably emotive response (the reminiscences of 9/11: as one of the Twin Towers has just collapsed a woman is screaming, ‘What the hell is going on!!’).

I was glued to the screen for the first couple of days but once my ahs and oh my gods started to sound less personal and more like united voices of democratic concern, I decided enough was enough. Not quite ‘mad as hell’, but I sure couldn’t take it any more: the horrifying headlines, the nuclear explosions, the misery in the north, the scares, the confusing charts, the mixed messages, the cautious experts versus the alarming voices of the news anchors. I was weary. So on the third day I ventured out to meet a friend. I didn’t care any more that the Fukushima plant was very much touch-and-go as yet another explosion was lurking round the corner. Jerry and I decided to go to the riverside, of all safe places. The Yodogawa riverbank was a perfect antidote to the claustrophobic environs of the past days. We brought out guitars, alcohol, poems and spent that afternoon jamming, drinking, chewing the fat. Maybe we chose to be there so that if someone asked us years later, ‘Where were you when the reactor 2 blew up?’ we’d say, ‘At the riverside, drinking booze’.

Watching other people’s misery on the television for hours on end gave me a consoling, if largely false, notion that I was being compassionate and concerned (if one wants to show compassion one should donate money to charity). On the other hand, my running away to the riverside despite the potential danger to my well-being, however infinitesimal, was a potentially self-destructive act, verging on nihilism. Yet it made a perfect sense to me. Our perception is at the same time an evaluation, and every evaluation, being subjective, results in a choice, be it moral or immoral (what is ethical over here may be less so over there). What would your average ‘neo-nihilist’ have to say about this? Let’s look at what a certain philosophy student wrote on ‘Philosophy Forums’:

It is logically impossible to derive an "ought" prescription from an "is" description or a value from a fact. For example it may be a fact that we have evolved compassion to aid our survival. But from this fact it is impossible to derive the value that one "ought" to be compassionate. Such a transgression of logic is as invalid as deriving the value that one "ought" to be aggressive from the fact that we have evolved aggression. Morality then is not based on reason but on sentiment which is both biologically and culturally conditioned. As Hume stated : "It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger." (It is not contrary to reason, it is just highly unusual).

[…] We perceive what is of value to us. Nihilism per se is impossible due to human nature. But different things are valuable to different people and different creatures. Therefore this account is known as neo nihilism. Objective morality is an illusion and like religion is a means to control others.

[…] To criticize is only to establish that a concept vanishes when it is thrust into a new milieu, losing some of its components, or acquiring others that transform it. But those who criticize without creating, those who are content to defend the vanished concept without being able to give it the forces it needs to return to life, are the plague of philosophy... Philosophy has a horror of discussions. It always has something else to do.
http://forums.philosophyforums.com/threads/metaethics-neo-nihilism-37641.html

To revert to the common suffering. In case you haven’t had enough of tsunami pictures, here is my pick of some of the most enduring ones. In the case of large-scale catastrophes, the aerial shots, the mid shots and the close-ups are all equally effective: buildings on fire, people being rescued or not rescued, people stuck in traffic, people tucked in street corners for the night, a man pondering a remoulded landscape, the elderly staring nowhere in particular. And then, the toys.

You can download hundreds of similar images in a large zip file (235 MB) here (if you can get past the uploader’s idiotic comment).

Adieu, Dear Sleuth

2011-03-26T00:53:00.013+09:00

Midsomer

CDI Barnaby

one step ahead

of all concerned.

There is no dead

man’s shoe

out of his step.

A missing piece

of the puzzle

hidden in his

lady’s chamber,

in the chamber of the

missing piece.

British television has recently parted with two of the greatest and dearest sleuths in recent history. First it was David Jason’s Frost last year, now it’s John Nettles’ Barnaby. The latter’s departure has been coming for quite some time, in fact the first hints came as long as two years back if memory serves me well, which made me watch the later episodes with a sort of premature nostalgia. Yet Nettles hung in there, and his exit seemed to have been put off indefinitely. When Barnaby finally announced his ‘long holiday’ in ‘Fit for Murder’ (watched it last night) it came across as a shock.

I loved to watch ‘A Touch of Frost’ in the late 90s and the early noughties and always thought of it as being superior to Midsomer because of the former’s realism, grittiness, and of course Jason’s marvellous performance. He imbued Inspector Frost with such depth that it was difficult not to root for the old bugger scene after scene. It was much easier to love a maverick DI, an anti-hero with more misgivings than you and I both account for, constantly at war with everyone and most of all with himself, the truest fighter for justice and a carer for his fellow-man that you’ll ever see on the box. Frost the incorrigible romantic.

On the other hand, Barnaby’s by and large understated performances were harder to be impressed by, yet no less impressive. Tom Barnaby was everything that Jack Frost wasn’t: methodical, well-spoken, systematic, dependable and trusted all around, even by his superiors. He had a quiet appeal of a thinking man, yet taking action when the situation called for it. I particularly liked Barnaby in the later episodes as there was a twinge of sadness forming round the edges of his slowly diminishing eyes (maybe to do with those announcements of early retirement). That Nettles managed to keep his Barnaby engaged and engaging, and avoid slipping into a routine, was no mean feat.

He was certainly helped by the professional supporting cast and a host of splendid guest appearances, and perhaps most of all by the picturesque countryside setting. And then there were the village fetes, the societies and clubs of all sorts teeming with jealousy, greed and unspeakable infidelities, there were of course all those murders, 222 of them to be precise, ranging from the mundane to the grotesque to the over-imaginative (my favourite two: a man decapitated on the ghost train, and that impalement inside the iron maiden). In short, the world of Midsomer county confounded by its own idiosyncrasies, the world most of the outside viewers would have been hard pressed to identify with, be they white, black, or yellow (the programme is broadcast to 231 territories around the world). Perhaps Midsomer is supposed to represent, in its producer's words, ‘the last bastion of Englishness’. Well, be that as it may (pun intended), people will continue watching the show for what it is – a quaint piece of entertainment that celebrates and pokes fun at its own idea of 'Englishness', at times succeeding in passing off murder as serious art-form.

In John Nettles’ ultimate ‘Fit for Murder’ Tom Barnaby and wife Joyce take a mini-break at one of those spa ‘rehabilitation centres' where you pay through the nose for having hot rocks placed over your body, for being doused in mud with a pair of cucumber slices for your eyes (there’s an amusing scene in which Barnaby talks rather intently to a woman covered in mud for few minutes thinking she is his wife). At the spa one is surrounded by silence – silence being a pretty rare commodity these days. Silence is sacred in the ‘garden of contemplation’ where one is supposed to practise yoga while sitting opposite a ‘golden’ statue of Buddha across a small pond, while keeping one’s voice down to a whisper. Then there’s the ‘volcanic massage’ where a girl called Cloud will arrange the ‘Himalayan’ stones in line with you chakras. If for some reason you don’t feel up for it, she’ll read your mind instead, as an extra. Cash in hand.

Silly as this may all sound (especially to men: it's rather odd that in the industrially developed countries, it’s usually women who more readily buy into yoga and all things transcendental, as opposed to Buddhist monks who are almost exclusively male), it is nevertheless curious that we find Barnaby at the end of the episode announcing his retirement to friends, stating that ‘something happened recently… that made me take a long, hard look at…’. Yet we never find out what that something is. Well, it has to do with Barnaby’s fear of dying on his birthday like his own father did years ago, compounded by the sense of guilt for being unkind and refusing to join his old man for what turned out to be a fateful spot of fishing. Funny that Tom, being the man of logic and deductive reasoning, should leave the viewers wondering if his retirement decision had been brought on, in part at least, by the powers of the occult. His decision, after all, did come after a couple of impromptu sessions with a girl who dabbles in occultism.

Has the power of chakra penetrated Tom’s mind after all? Has he finally succumbed to the all-seeing third eye? Well, we’ll never know won’t we. I am probably reading too much into this anyway. The man had to retire from the show one way or the other. Well, retire he did. And rarely has there been a more low-key, if slightly cryptic, farewell by a long-standing television icon than Barnaby’s in Midsomer Murders. Thank you John Nettles.

Japan Woes

2011-03-22T12:01:00.014+09:00

Nicaragua, 1979. Popular uprising against the misrule of the President Somoza (of whom the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said, ‘Sure he’s sonofabitch, but he is our sonofabitch’). In the course of the next couple of years the civil war led to the deaths of some 5% of the population, and a deposition of the president after a 43-year dictatorship, the longest period of the state-sponsored terror in Latin American history. The post-revolutionary mood in the streets was one of unhinged celebration of the new-found freedom, whereby people expressed their contempt for conventions and rules at every possible opportunity. This was in particular manifested through the mass disregard for traffic rules. Here’s Norman Lewis, quoting a policeman in Managua, from the excellent travel essay ‘Beautiful Bean-Stew Faces’:

‘It happens all the time’, he said. ‘They’ve all gone crazy about freedom, so wherever there’s the chance to drive the wrong way down a street, they do. The latest crazy thing is that traffic lights are supposed to interfere with personal choice, so they are tearing them down all over the town. They are out to prove we’re really free’.

This reminds me of a Serbian idiom, ‘ko da su s lanca pušteni’, literarily means ‘as if they were unleashed from the chains’. By contrast, in Japan hardly anyone is on a mission to prove they are free or independent. This very much applies to traffic and driving. On March 11^th I was watching live pictures as tsunami mercilessly wiped everything in its path. The fluid mass of debris was approaching a line of cars orderly waiting in front of the traffic lights. The drivers would be very much aware of the nearing onrush of water. Yet not a single car moved! Or not until the big wave was so close that the cars suddenly found themselves scrambling for the dry patches of land. But by then it was too late.

We think of stoicism as a very British virtue – all Blitz spirit and 'women and children first' – but would we react to a disaster with the kind of resilience the Japanese have? – Ian Jack, The Guardian

Anyone who has been to Japan or met a Japanese person would have been familiar with their general distaste for personal conflict or the showing of personal initiative. Here, the name of the game is respect for privacy, team work, collaboration. These attributes are particularly apparent in smaller communities, villages, towns, companies. In the aftermath of the nuclear leaks, the sense of allegiance and self-sacrifice yielded some astonishing results in Tokyo where the previously announced power cuts never materialized due to the fact that people dropped their electricity consumption by such margin that not only the cuts proved unnecessary but there was in fact a surplus of energy! Yes, hard to imagine something like that happening in the UK.

In Tōhoku, however, the picture is much bleaker. Japanese fortitude and composure has been pushed to the limits by the multifold disaster – earthquake, tsunami, nuclear crisis, the ensuing supply difficulties, the rescue operations hampered by snow and freezing temperatures. After a week of living on the verge of starvation and with shortages of water, fuel, heating, electricity, and medical supplies, there have been first reports of angry exchanges and even punch-ups among the locals. No reports of looting as yet. No doubt in many countries these would be a norm much earlier on. And it doesn’t help that most of the afflicted are the elderly – Japan being an alarmingly aging society, with more than a quarter of population over 65 years old.

In the meantime we can only dare imagine what it feels like to live under such conditions – on a daily, hourly basis. Some would say, at least these people have been spared their lives. Then again how much of a consolation is that when no help is in sight? One middle-aged woman, who lost two members of her family together with her house, said: ‘I am alive, but I don’t know if that’s good or bad’.

In response to my recent email to a colleague, a teacher in Kyoto like myself, in which I asked how worried he was about the current threat of nuclear contamination, Shaun talked about his general concern and quipped how this part of Japan [Kansai] feels like a different country, rather disconnected from the northeast. ‘Different country’ is certainly one way of describing the apparent normality to be found on the streets of the ancient capital. People go about their business. Shops, restaurants, bars, pachinko parlours are all teeming with punters and customers no more and no less than usual. The city trains and buses are running on time (compare Tokyo’s lines, either cancelled or operating with reduced service). The only thing out of the ordinary are these small bands of activists who are to be seen, and especially heard, lined up at busy street corners and outside the larger train stations, incessantly chanting so as to draw cash donations from the public. Oh, and today I noticed that in my local department store they have partially switched off lights in certain less-visited shopping sections.

Speaking of lights, I’ve been thinking how Japanese post-war hefty reliance on, and investment in, nuclear power must seem now rather ironic, also bearing in mind the Hiroshima and Nagasaki catastrophes. That Japan has decided to build so many nuclear plants is a direct result of the country’s paltry allotment of natural resources. The nuclear power has become the major source, accounting for about 29% of Japan’s energy.

Meanwhile, people living in the northeast as well as in the Kanto area (around Tokyo) remain very concerned about the imminent future, and understandably so. There is an ongoing poll in the Japan Times online, dubbed ‘Stay or go’, which looks like this:

And here is how the votes stand only a few minutes later (March 21^st ):

You can check how the votes develop, and vote yourself, here. At least most foreigners have somewhere to go to. The poll would surely look different had it been conducted solely in the Kansai region, where I suppose gaijin do feel safer. Yet, should there be another major explosion at the plant, god-forbid, the worry-wrinkles would inevitably set upon the faces of my fellow Kyotoites.

A fellow poet living in Osaka presented his poem few months ago in our writing workshop. The title was ‘Post-Nuclear Pasta’. My favourite bit is this post-apocalyptic moment when the speaker explains how things were 'before':

We used to have tomato sauce for our pasta,

I tell the dull kid who lives on the other side of the scorch-marks.

He was born just a few months after the hot flashes.

He’s got weepy eyes and a cauliflower nose.

When I tell him we used to eat tomatoes and that they didn’t have

hard, crusty skins neither, he snaps, “You’re off your Geiger counter!”

Little did the author know how topical the stuff would soon turn out to be. The poem must be pulsating like a GM tube at the moment. Well, here’s a map which shows how the counters are pulsating in the north of the country. Note the useful comparisons with the radiation in daily life. Click to view larger size.

March 21^st, 2011

The Desert of the Tartars

2011-03-16T12:31:00.010+09:00

Directed by Zurlini in 1976 (his ultimate film), an epic in which hardly anything happens for two and a half hours – apart from people growing old, leaving their posts or getting promoted. So why do viewers get sucked in by films of this kind? It’s the imagery, it’s the characters, it’s the plain old suffering, stupid. Highly ponderous stuff. Existentialism at its best. The absurdity of human endeavour, crashed hopes, hardline pessimism, anti-heroism, the very malignancy of life – the stuff that makes us human. Well, some of us perhaps. Ah, and that mesmerizing desert, its beauty, its restrained cruelty.

The film follows Drogo, an officer in the Austrian army, from the moment he is sent to his first assignment as a young man to a lonely fort Bastiano, nicknamed ‘dead border station’, lying at a desert’s edge where the Tartar attack is permanently imminent. The film, among other things, is a study of the ‘four stages’ of a man’s career: at first Drogo is ambitious, idealistic and inevitably bored at the outpost, desperate to leave; after a while he begins to rationalize his inactivity by the belief that he would eventually leave at some point; when the chance finally comes certain conditions do not allow it and the man faces up to the possibility he will never be able to leave; in key decision moments his sense of duty gets the better of him, as he gradually grows more passive and obedient and is rewarded for such behaviour with absurd promotions; in the end the man has become an inseparable part of the institution and is desperate to stay where he by now wholly belongs. But it's something more than just passivity and resignation. Something more sinister, something akin to a false hope, that vague feeling lurking in the depths of our being, a feeling carrying the latent, irrational, expectation that our moment is bound to arrive. Drogo seems to have spent his entire life waiting for his most personal hour to come, however ambivalent the moment was to be (possibly a show of bravery and the ensuing military glory?). But the hour never strikes. When at last Drogo’s health deteriorates, he becomes an anachronism, a walking detritus, resembling the very blasé, ineffectual officer he would once loath to become.

The ‘inevitable’ denouement, such as it stands, will in some modern viewers likely elicit their own career paths of undeserving, miserable jobs, lifelong devotion to a company, and thousands upon thousands of hours of those arduous daily routines. One of my favourite lines: Drogo (Jacques Perrin): ‘I was sent here by mistake. Doctor Rovin (Trintignant): ‘Here or elsewhere... we're all somewhere by mistake’.

Rarely in a film can one see a single edifice exerting such overwhelming, insidious power over the fate of its inhabitants, as in ‘Il Deserto dei Tartari’. This magnificent structure, the film’s setting, is Bam Citadel, located in southeastern Iran. Arg-e Bam used to be the largest adobe building in the world until it was more or less completely destroyed by an earthquake in 2003 which, incidentally, killed more than 26,000 people (!). The then president of Iran announced after the earthquake the citadel would be rebuilt. Being the World Heritage site several countries are helping its reconstruction. For its part ‘Japan has granted some US$1.3 million to Iran for the reconstruction, and has supported this project by sending equipment and creating the 3D plan of Bam Citadel to increase the accuracy of the renovation’(Wikipedia). Right now it looks like they are going to need that money back doesn’t it.

The immense Bam Citadel before the quake

March 11, 2011

2011-03-13T13:11:00.016+09:00

Honshu crescent

peeled off

down to middle

metal sinks

wipers beating

eyes closed

the wave:

caught in the fishing net

a truck

the unclaimed

buried en masse

shovel by shovel

in the end:

through the pine needles

the sound of wind

A useful source of information, maps and images:
http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2011/03/earthquake-pictures-videos-mapped.html

Woman in Chains

2011-03-11T14:10:00.012+09:00

I have decided to start a new thing here on Kyotocacti: I'll be putting up links to various film clips, uploaded to youtube by yours truly. These will be either scenes from feature films or a short film in its entirety. The flicks I like to watch tend to be oldish, rare and thus harder to find. These films are less about narrative and more about content, be it a noirish play with lights and shadows, be it a subversive take on story-telling, be it a meditation on human condition. Or none of those, but ordinary stories about ordinary people. And then there will be silents. Animation, too.

Let's cut to the chase. Here is the first clip from Henri Clouzot's 'La Prisonniere' (1968). Saw it last night. While not Clouzot's best, the film contains some remarkable sequences marked by quick editing, the late 60's 'psychedelic' imagery and a very striking use of colour. The film successfully juxtaposes its rather bleak outlook on postmodern alienation with an almost celebratory use of colour, and in this respect evokes certain European works of the period - Antonioni's 'Il Deserto Rosso' springs to mind.

My clip actually contains the last few minutes of the film, including the 'trippy' dream sequence (which someone on IMDB compared to Bowman's journey in Kubrick's '2001') plus the credits with a delightful Adagio from Mahler's Symphony #4.

A breathtaking finale, a collage of striking images that somehow manages to distil the plot as well as the girl's emotional disorientation. She is hospitalized, comatose after a car suicide attempt in her brown Renault 4 - I remember the doors having a rather cute checked pattern, as if the car was wrapped in a big woollen blanket. The suicide motif is recurring in 'Woman in Chains': Clouzot seems to suggest a personal crisis stems from a loss of moral compass in postmodern art/life.

After the girl wakes she's mumbling 'Stan, Stan'. Alas it is not the erratic Stan who is by her bedside, but her rather bewildered-looking hubby. Gilbert's last lines: 'Don't worry... all will be fine'.

Or will it?
Note: NOT for the faint-hearted.

Kiri Sute Gomen

2011-03-03T17:13:00.012+09:00

is a Japanese expression, nowadays rather rarely used, which roughly translates as ‘I apologize in advance for this’ or, more loosely, ‘Mistakes were made’, indicating a sort of mock apology for something we have done which caused grievance to others, yet an expression devoid of a genuine feeling of self-reproach. The non-apology apology.

Wish I knew of this phrase a few weeks back when two traffic wardens stopped me on scooter for taking an illegal turn. Still, I did manage to talk them into letting me off the hook. Don’t ask me how. Spent almost half hour on the street talking and bullshitting, like ‘Japanese traffic rules are different from UK’ and such nonsense. If I’d known the phrase I am sure I would’ve used it. Not as effectively though as this piece of declamation by a humorist Bruce McCall, in a 2001 New York Times piece entitled "The Perfect Non-apology Apology":

‘Nobody is sorrier than me that the police officer had to spend his valuable time writing out a parking ticket on my car. Though from my personal standpoint I know for a certainty that the meter had not yet expired, please accept my expression of deep regret at this unfortunate incident.’

The above is so much in tune with Japanese, especially the overpolite Japanese used in formal situations (I don’t mean to imply Japanese are insincere though). Here is the one who indeed WAS insincere:

‘Kiri sute gomen’ actually goes back to the samurai times (literally: kiru = cut; suteru = throw away, abandon; gomen = pardon). It would be uttered by a member of the samurai caste, in situations whereby certain harm, injury or a violation of honour had been done to him by a member of a lower caste (farmers, artisans, merchants). Such situation often called for an immediate retribution by the offended party, samurai that is, the utterance of the phrase accompanying a blow by the sword. Thus in its original connotation ‘kirisute gomen’ meant ‘authorization to cut and abandon (the victim’s body)’. A samurai had the ‘right to strike’ with his katana anyone of the lower class who compromised the code of honour or who behaved in a disrespectful manner, such as mistreating the weak or the sick.

In one of well known incident, a commoner bumped into a samurai. The samurai pointed out the disrespect but the commoner refused to apologise. Feeling merciful, the samurai offered the commoner his ‘wakizashi’ (short sword) so he had a chance to defend himself. Instead, the commoner decided to run away with his ‘wakizashi’, causing further dishonour. The incident resulted in the samurai being disowned from the clan. He later regained his honour by seeking out the commoner and killing the whole family.
Wikipedia, ‘Kiri sute gomen’ entry

The phrase was also used, of all places, in the James Bond novel You Only Live Twice, where the villain Blofeld asks of Bond: "Have you ever heard the Japanese expression kirisute gomen?" to which Bond replies: "Spare me the Lafcadio Hearn, Blofeld."

Lafcadio Hearn a.k.a. Koizumi Yakumo, is an author of travel journals and Japanese ghost stories, largely credited with introducing Japan of the late 19th C. to the outside world. Lafcadio was a truly international writer if ever there was one. His peripatetic life began in Greece in 1850. Born to a British/Irish father (an army doctor) and a Greek mother of Maltese origin. Baptized in a Greek Orthodox church. Moved to Dublin with his mum when we was two years old (she went back to Greece soon thereafter), and subsequently lived in Wales with his aunt, who sent him off to attend Catholic colleges in Durham and France. Disenchanted by religion, Lafcadio renounces Catholicism. At the age of 19 he is sent to the U.S. where he stayed for 10 years, first in Cincinnati then New Orleans. There he wrote impassioned articles with a range of subjects, from corruption to the Creole cuisine, and is today credited with ‘inventing’ New Orleans as a place of mystery and exoticism. Apparently, more books have been written about him than any former resident of New Orleans other than Louis Armstrong.

Hearn spent two years in the French West Indies before being sent off to Japan as a newspaper correspondent. The paper’s commission broke off and Hearn spent the rest of his life in Japan, teaching and writing. His writing was so influential that not only it shaped Western perception of the country but also Japanese perceptions of Japan.

Lafcadio settled in the town of Matsue in western Japan, where he met and married Setsu Koizumi, a daughter in a high-ranking samurai family. Once a naturalized Japanese, Lafcadio changed his name to Koizumi Yakumo (wonder if he ever used kirisuto gomen phrase, now being a part of the samurai clan and all). Lafcadio died of heart failure in 1904, at the age of 54.

Lafcadio with wife and their first son. Lafcadio always preferred to be photographed from the side so that his left eye could not be seen. He lost vision in his eye during a playground accident at college.

Since 1960’s Lafcadio’s summer house has been on display at a commemorative park ‘Meiji Mura’ near Nagoya, where I hope to visit next week. Should my sojourn take place, the full report will naturally follow on these pages. Plus more on Lafcadio’s writings and influence. Stay tuned.

the lure of a hot spring

2011-02-25T12:31:00.010+09:00

Japanese public bathing is sometimes referred to as hadaka no tsukiai (‘relationship in nude’). The idea is to lose clothes and forget about one’s age, status, background etc. Naked we are all equal. My recent visit to Arima onsen, located just north of Kobe city, was an opportunity to experience this relationship, or what Monthy Python’s Terry Jones, as a famous nude organist, once qualified as ‘two separate strands of existence, the essential nudity of man.’ And I came up with a poem which I am gladly sharing with you.

ARIMA

I am a double stranger here.

Here’s my Caucasian face

which by definition interferes

with the custom-held peace.

And here is my alien body.

So I play a double of myself,

a hairy-chest version in a documentary

hastily titled ‘In Pursuit of Health’.

I must heed the spa’s etiquette

to avoid that extra bit of attention –

how to arrange clothes in a basket,

how to undress in slow motion.

Guided by instinct and common sense

I screen my member by a hand towel,

take a splash in some suspense,

perch on the bath-edge like an owl,

then casually slide into hot bubbles –

all of which a called for attitude.

Here, no one’s asking for trouble.

They invest in relationships in nude.

At first, every ripple seems sacred.

Every leg movement, each glance,

each spatter down to a droplet:

that’s how begins a bath romance.

I get bolder as body gets warmer.

I move into an enormous teacup

in whose faintly green corner

a camomile bag bobs up.

Then it’s a kinsen, the iron bath.

It sports a kidney bean colour

and I want to laugh

as I fart into its rusty splendour.

I slip into a transparent ginsen

yielding to its smell of bleach

as long as I’m able to discern

my own foot within reach.

But after a while the mind

gives in to visions in the heat:

a man’s bald, jagged behind

I construe as a Hellenic sculpt.

Soon I arrive at a melting point

that reels me about like a drunk:

scorched, gutted, dehydrated –

head, limbs and trunk.

I slump on a deck-chair

and watch my wilted self steam

in the winter air.

At last stripped of self-esteem

I lie here god knows how long

under the cold twilight sky.

Only now I yearn to belong,

my social ineptitude to justify

and it’s to do with a mere gesture

like my refusal to stare,

or adopting a posture

of a foreign, ignorant bear.

Sadly, it is time to leave

at this most defenceless hour.

I hope that all of us believe

that after our exit shower,

taken in front of everyone

and no one in particular,

each of us will have done

our best to absolve the other.

We imparted our scruples

to the water. The water

changed us back to mortals,

by this much lighter.

February 13^th, 2011

Here are some photos of hot springs in Japan from the past. I always find historical photos vastly appealing. They evoke a sense of harmony, at times mystery and lost innocence, and most of all the unspoilt, uncluttered beauty of people, buildings, artefact. These particular images appear to be in public domain, and come from kinouya.com, a lovely site dedicated to old photos/postcards of Japan. There are dozens and dozens of them: to browse more photos click on the fifth button from the top, then click on the picture of a ship. The site is both in English and Japanese.

Hakone Dogahisma Onsen

Noboribetsu Onsen

Kinosaki Onsen, c. 1910

Click on photos to enlarge.

the revolution will be televised

2011-02-24T18:49:00.006+09:00

SOMETIMES, TELEVISION

can be such sick fun:

the live interpreter who takes

al Gaddafi’s rant

by the horns and soon

the two men are in wild synergy,

their impromptu voices

breathing virtually in unison,

driven by satellite incongruity.

Television has not given us

such consonant-and-lectern

thumping yet. And not

to forget that fighter jet

in the setting Libyan sun,

caught like a monstrous lie

by a common man's hand.

Happy Old New Year

2011-01-14T17:16:00.013+09:00

As it is called in the Orthodox Christian circles, namely Russian (‘Старый Новый год’). In Serbia they call it a Serbian New Year (‘Srpska Nova Godina’), and yes, you guessed it, it’s the new year celebration according to the old Julian Calendar, and which corresponds to January 13/14^th of the modern Gregorian Calendar (in 20^th and 21^st centuries, that is). As Wikipedia reads

A large part of the population celebrates Serbian New Year in a similar way as the New Year on January 1. This time, usually one concert is organized in front of either City Hall or the National Parliament in Belgrade, while fireworks are prepared by the Serbian Orthodox Church and fired from the Church Cathedral of Saint Sava, where people also gather. Restaurants, clubs, cafe's and hotels are usually full-booked and organize New Year's celebrations with food and live music.
A traditional folk name for this holiday as part of Twelve Days of Christmas is Little Christmas (Мали Божић/Mali Božić). Some families continue with the procedures of Serbian Christmas traditions.

Being born and having spent my formative years in Belgrade in the 70’s and 80’s in the politically and economically highly experimental, and ultimately disastrous, style of Self-Governing Socialism, I look upon these festivities with a hint of nostalgia, but mainly as a outside onlooker, someone who has been out of the country way too long to be able to identify with its reawakened and ever-burgeoning religious rites, embraced thus by the population after 50-odd years of Church repression by Tito’s regime. It must be said, however, that repression was rather mild and half-hearted, and the Christmas and other religious traditions in the various regions of the former Yugoslavia were very much kept alive. I remember that even in those days people would greet each other during the Twelve Days of Christmas (January 7 – January 18), with ‘Hristos se rodi’ (‘Christ is Born’), to which a proper reply would be ‘Vaistinu se rodi’ (‘Truly He is Born’).

I recall wonderful, homely traditions such as the baking of a Christmas loaf česnica (roughly pronounced ‘chess-ni-tza’) inside which a coin would be inserted while it is kneaded. Once baked, the family members would break the loaf and whoever winds up with the coin is considered one lucky sod (the elders would often make sure the coin(s) end up in children’s hands). Here is a česnica I remember – sweet and crunchy – as it is made in Banat, northern Serbia where my folks come from:

This particular tradition has been extended to public events, i.e. česnica consumption on a large scale, which all fits in nicely with our age of austerity and empty purses. One such newly-cherished tradition is the breaking of a 50-kg česnica (the salty version) at Terazije Square in Belgrade. This year it took place last Friday, January 7th, on Christmas Day. The huge loaf was baked and delivered with three golden ducats hiding inside, the first of which found its way into the hands of a local pensioner, to everyone’s delight. Here are some pics from the event: from the all-smiles down to the last crumbs (courtesy of Beta agency)

Speaking of austerity and crumbs, this morning while browsing the B92 online (the famous Serbian media service) I come across this article about the findings of the organization called Gallup International who have been conducting global polls at the end of each year since 2000. This survey, according to their website, ‘is released around the world on the 1st of January, [asking] people whether they think the new year will be better or worse than the last one, both for themselves and for their country; whether they feel economic and employment prospects will be better or worse and whether the coming year will be peaceful or troubled’ [http://www.gallup-international.com/]. This year’s poll questioned 64.000 people in 53 countries. The citizens of Serbia are the greatest world pessimists when it comes to the overall expectations for 2011 (last year they were 3^rd –placed on the pessimism scale). They are closely followed by Romanians, French and Icelanders. The biggest optimists are – would you believe it – Nigerians, followed by Brazilians, Vietnamese, Chinese and Ghanians. However, if you look at the BBC news page reporting on the same story [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12056250], you will find that it is actually UK citizens who are the most pessimistic about the economic prospects: 'The survey, conducted by leading pollsters associated with Gallup International, suggests the most downhearted country is the UK.' The article continues:

The UK was particularly downbeat in four key questions.
Will 2011 be a year of prosperity? UK - 8% Yes; World average 30%
Will unemployment rise? UK 37% Yes; World average 17%
Will you find a job quickly if you become unemployed? UK 17% Yes; World average 31%
Will 2011 be better than 2010? UK 23% Yes; World average 42%
Gallup says its findings suggest: "While wealth is still concentrated in Europe and North America, there is a shift in power and prosperity from the West of the 20th Century to the East".

To corroborate the above, here is the ‘employment fear’ chart from the Gallup’s Barometer of Hope and Despair 2011 (click to enlarge):

Interestingly, Serbia falls under ‘the countries less than 30% fearful of rising unemployment’ (24% to be exact). But this is more likely to do with the fact that the unemployment rate in Serbia is already at about 20% and it can hardly get worse than that now can it?! Dear me. The two countries I spent most of my life in, both with such rosy prospects. Would be interesting to see at the end of the year how right or wrong the respondents were.

Happy Old New Year