Hiyoshi Taisha

The first thing that catches one’s eye are two wooden structures nestled high up the hill in the midst of a thick, lush forest overlooking Biwa lake. The sight alone is intriguing enough to make one wish to visit the temple in the first place. A map by the footpath suggests large temple grounds. What sticks out is an odd-looking position of three bridges, situated in the very close proximity to each other. Our visit will show that bridges are not the only unusual feature at Hiyoshi Taisha.

At the south gate we are required to pay entrance fee, somewhat surprising as Shinto shrines in Japan are usually visited free of charge. I later learn that in the Middle Ages, the nearby Enryaku-ji temple influenced the shrine to include some Buddhist ethos: could this be the reason for fee inclusion? A middle-aged woman with an overly serious expression hands us the printed guides: the English version, being a single sheet of typed text on A4 sheet of paper, looks a poor cousin to its fancy Japanese counterpart. No complaints though, good intentions appreciated.

After climbing up a longish set of stone steps, we find ourselves in front of a vermillion gate (torii). The torii is built in Sanno style, unusual in that its two top lintels are crowned with a triangular attachment, a sort of gable, thus creating a ‘rooftop’, or perhaps an ‘arms-in-prayer’, effect (Wikipedia suggests Hiyoshi Taisha has the best example of Sanno torii in Japan).

After the obligatory bow, we continue sauntering up a wide gravel path. It is a beautiful, crisp autumn day. After a few minutes another surprise: inside a metal cage two snow monkeys! It strikes us immediately how small and dark the cage is. Poor fellas, they could certainly do with some exercise. Give them more elbow room for pity’s sake!

                    Messengers of God

                    behind metal bars:

                    a pair of macaques

We leave the caged creatures behind and soon come upon a rock apparently of certain import. My companion Y. kindly translates the adjacent notice, which states the rock is considered medicinal. It has a slight depression in the middle, allowing for rainwater to develop on rainy days. Thus formed, the water inside this puddle is believed to be therapeutic, for the ailing eye in particular. Should one then splash one’s eyes with puddle water and expect a miraculous recovery?!

Climbing up the Hachioji hill to reach the aforementioned ‘twin’ shrine halls proves a minor miracle itself. Y. is wearing flat shoes which invariably threaten to fall apart. It does not help that we are sweating like pigs with no towel at hand, that the path is steep and dotted with sharp rocks. It takes us forty or so minutes to reach the two shrines, Sannomiyagu and Ushiogu. The view of lake Biwa is spectacular and for it alone the climb was worth it. We sit down on the steps and take a few panoramic photos. At one moment the breeze carries a strong herbal fragrance over to our nostrils, so strong in fact that for a second I think I have just entered an essential oils store!

                    Hachioji hill:

                    smitten by the essence

                    of an unknown herb

      

We climb a few more steps to pay respects to a famous Great Golden Rock situated between the two buildings. The rock derives its name from the fact that the sunlight is reflected off it on sunny mornings. The rock is even mentioned in the Kojiki, the oldest written record of Japanese history. I imagine the golden sun reflection must be quite a sight. If I ever decide to come back here on some sunny day, it will only be me in full hiking gear, and with plenty of water!

It is time to walk back downhill. Y. wishes she had a pair of wings to put on then glide back to the lower altitudes! Walking, or more accurately, staggering toward the shrine exit we pass the three stone bridges we saw earlier on the map.  Why are they so close to each other? Y. and I venture a few guesses. Perhaps they were made to serve different social stratums: one for nobility, one for priests, one for peasants. Or were they built for aesthetic effect, as a kind of medieval take on conceptual art installation? The truth, we later find out, is more prosaic than that. After Oda Nobunaga’s army burnt the shrine around 1571, the new buildings were erected soon after. The rebuild included old wooden bridges, which were replaced by the fireproof stone ones, which stand to this day. But why three bridges? The more the merrier, we dare presume.

Now and Then

Quintus Curtius Rufus, a Roman historian (1^st c. AD) wrote on Alexander the Great and his troubled, at least initially, founding of the city of Alexandria in Egypt: ‘There is a report, that after the king had completed the Macedonian custom of marking out the circular boundary for the future city-walls with barley-meal, flocks of birds flew down and fed on the barley’. Driving through the Republic of Macedonia this summer I wondered if the road builders of the recently-fledged country followed in the great man’s footsteps. Because the long stretches along the ‘Aleksandar Makedonski’ motorway are completely unmarked: no lines of any kind or colour. Have the birds gobbled up the barley?

Driving along the ‘motorway’, dotted with bumps and holes of all shape and size, can be a pretty scary experience, especially at night, the road being unlit save for your car’s headlights and, if lucky, moonlight. That was on the way to Greece, north-south direction. On the way back some nine days later, south-to-north, we knew better and drove in broad daylight. But the persistence of bumps and holes proved too much and eventually steered us off the main highway and onto the local ‘E-roads’, which proved to be – surprise, surprise – in no better state. Only when we got on the very local, virtually vehicle-less 125a, leading through beautiful landscapes along the Pčinja river, only then did we finally open all four windows and let in the warm summer air, scented by sundry wild flowers.

On the Macedonia-Serbian border crossing we were the only customers. Which must be why it took ages both for the Macedonian and the Serbian boys in blue to let us through after giving our passports some seriously close scrutiny. The Pelince border crossing must be one of the most romantic (if that is a suitable word for a border crossing): right in the gully, surrounded by lush forests and so, so quiet, only birdsong and the humming of river is heard.

A ten-minute drive past the border takes you to the St Prohor Pčinjski Orthodox monastery, it being the real clincher behind our original detour. The monastic complex is beautifully arranged, comprised of the St Prohor Church and the magnificent konak, the imposing residential building, sporting a unique architectural style. The place was abuzz with workers, busy with all sorts of repairs and adjustments – you could see something positive was taking place. A further proof for the care and concern for its surroundings was this wooden notice board (see if you can figure out what all the symbols stand for). Click to enlarge.

St Prohor’s life story is a story of a devout and a dedicated anchorite. According to the apparently extensive and well-preserved hagiography, Prohor was born in the first half of the 11^th century, into a wealthy and educated family. One day, elated upon hearing Matthew’s ‘He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me’, Prohor abandoned what remaining shreds of secularity were still fettering him, and left for the high hills, never to return. The next thirty two years (some sources say much longer) he spent living in a small cave with the mountain beasts, sleeping on the bare rock, feeding on wild fruits and grass, drinking water from the mountain spring, never setting eyes on a living human soul.

Well, almost never. The legend goes that one day a hunter hard on the heels of an injured doe, which has just found a shelter with Prohor, comes across the old man, is immediately startled and starts backing off. Prohor calls out to him and the two begin conversing. The hunter turns out to be a Byzantine military aristocrat Diogenes (which Prohor somehow already knew) and eventually Prohor prophesies Diogenes is to become the future emperor of Byzantium. Prohor also pledges Diogenes that once he becomes a king, he should duly remember the old hermit’s prophesy.

 

Decades later, Romanos IV Diogenes (1068-1071) has a dream in which the old prophet admonishes him with words: ‘Why, great Diogenes, have you forgotten your old garb and me the old hermit? Make an effort and build me at least a small temple where I could pray to God until my final days’. The Emperor, frightened, immediately sets off to the north Macedonian mountains to try and find Prohor. After many days of fruitless search, Prohor reappears in Diogenes’ dream and tells him to go to Mount Kozjak and look for a cave above which a white eagle soars, after which Diogenes finally finds the cave and in it the old man’s remains, lying intact and quite unspoiled. On the spot Diogenes builds a small church dedicated to St Luke and further down, at the Pčinja riverbank, another, a more imposing one, where St Prohor’s relics remain to this day.

                             From left to right: Diogenes IV, St Prohor, King Milutin (click to enlarge)

 

Incidentally, Diogenes’ own fate as an emperor turned out to be a sort of royal martyrdom in its own right. This from Wikipedia:

During his reign [Diogenes] was determined to halt the decline of the Byzantine military and stop Turkish incursions into the Byzantine Empire, but in 1071 he was captured and his army routed at the Battle of Manzikert, lead by the Sultan Alp Arslan.

[…] According to a number of Byzantine historians… Arslan at first had difficulty believing the dusty and tattered warrior brought before him was the Roman Emperor. He then stepped down from his seat and placed his foot on Romanos' neck. But after this sign of ritual humiliation, Arslan raised Romanos from the ground, and ordered him to be treated like a king. From then on he treated him with extreme kindness, never saying a cruel word to him in the Emperor's eight-day stay in his camp, and then released him in exchange for a treaty and the promise of a hefty ransom.

[…]In the meantime, the opposition faction scheming against Romanos IV decided to exploit the situation. While still captive [Romanos] was overthrown in a palace coup, and when released he was quickly defeated by the army led by one Andronikos Doukas. Pursued by Andronikos, [Romanos IV] was eventually forced to surrender by the garrison at Adana upon receiving assurances of his personal safety. Before leaving the fortress, he collected all the money he could lay his hands on and sent it to the Sultan as proof of his good faith, along with a message: "As emperor, I promised you a ransom of a million and a half. Dethroned, and about to become dependent upon others, I send you all I possess as proof of my gratitude".

Andronikos stipulated that Diogenes’ life would be spared if he resigned the purple and retired into a monastery. Romanos agreed, and this agreement was ratified at Constantinople. However, John Doukas reneged on the agreement, and sent men to have Romanos cruelly blinded on June 29, 1072, before sending him into exile to Prote in the Sea of Marmara. Without medical assistance, his wound became infected, and he soon endured a painfully lingering death. The final insult was given a few days before his death, when Romanos received a letter from Michael Psellos, congratulating him on the loss of his eyes. He finally died, praying for the forgiveness of his sins, and his wife Eudokia was permitted to honour his remains with a magnificent funeral.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanos_IV_Diogenes

Now, all these machinations have a familiar ring to it. Have the successive governments on the Balkan peninsula in recent history not been their own worst enemies? Have they not been vying for power under any excuse and at any price? Have they not been pursuing their own fat interests instead of ensuring the prosperity of their own citizens? Has this blatant disregard not led many Balkan countries to an economic as well as spiritual cesspit?

As for the spirituality and the church, well, look at Prohor’s shining example and then look at the Orthodox elite in Greece, Serbia, Russia today. In Russia, the Church has acted as Putin’s bodyguard, to paraphrase Hitchens. The highly privileged orders of Greek and Serbian monks are exempt from tax, drive expensive cars, talk on mobiles, and bicker over property and funds. One recent example:

The around 2,600 monks residing at the Vatopaidi monastery in Mount Athos defied the Greek Ministry of Finance last year when it required the so-called autonomous territory pay property taxes on its commercial property.

Mount Athos, a 300 km2 peninsula in Greece, is off limits to women and is exempt from paying VAT. Its mandate prohibits “heterodox or schismatics to live on the Holy Mountain” and states its elected Abbot “must not have been convicted of malversation of monastic property.”

Its chief operator, Abbot Ephraim, is charged with money laundering and embezzlement in a land swap that saw valuable state land traded for less valuable property held by Vatopaidi.

The Hellenic court handed him a six-month suspended sentence in February 2012.

Another monk also took the blame, as well as a former judge from the area in northern Greece where the land swaps took place.

Ephraim, who posted €300,000 bail, was released after four months of detention in Korydallos prison. The former abbot is now residing at the monastery and is not allowed to leave Mount Athos.

The Greek edition of the International Herald Tribune reported that Ephraim called his conditional release "a miracle of the Virgin."

 http://euobserver.com/economic/116962

 Talk about dignity and sainthood.

Eurotrip p.1

My First Massage Outside of Asia: Lake Palić, March 2012

Normally I’d sigh and grunt like a sow once a deft hand finds the right spot – of which there must be thousands from the frontal bone to my big toe. This time round there is none of it.

Instead I have to concentrate on the small talk, both of us intent on squeezing out a firsthand info from the other. Me, I ask about the life of ordinary folks in the northernmost part of Serbia as he probes into a life of an expat earning his breadcrumbs in the Far East.

I learn electricity bills are the local top vexation, so much so that even a pair of wealthy returnees living in a pretentious villa near Palić, keep only one room heated in winter. I learn my masseur juggles two other jobs, a nighttime watchman and a security guard in a primary school. I learn how one of his clients was a Japanese man light as a feather, who was to marry a local Hungarian girl the following day; how a certain German prick asked him to work on his left foot for an entire hour and left him no tip; how he massaged some famous people none of whom talked much. I tell him that Serbs in Japan are as rare as hen’s teeth, that I’d sometimes kill for a hearty Pannonian dish, that I miss the hugs and the open bitterness and how I wish I could chew the cud with my Chinese masseuse sometimes, who charges me five times he does. Which in itself calls for a hearty tip.

                                                                The sun sets at lake Palic

Daybreak

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.

Back from Hols

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.

Bamboonery - Part 1

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

Germans in Okinawa / How Thick Was Berlin Wall

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.

On Awaji Island

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